This trick applies to laptops with Intel 915 or 945 graphics card.

A few days ago I installed Ubuntu on my work laptop, a Acer TravelMate 4230. The installation was painless, as one would expect with a Linux distribution “for human beings”. However I couldn’t seem to get the native resolution in Xorg (the graphical engine) right, even though the setup found it and stored it in the configuration file.

I ran both hwinfo –monitor and hwinfo –framebuffer. The first gave me 1280 by 800 as native resolution. The latter however, only gave me 4:3 resolutions. To correct this limitation I installed a package called “915resolution”.

apt-get install 915resolution

This package patches the framebuffer, so a reboot is necessary for this to take effect.

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