How to change screen resolution in Ubuntu

While this is a rare issue, it is also possible that your desktop is experiencing an incorrect resolution issue. This can be caused by a bug in the GPU driver, which causes the monitor to not be recognized correctly. So if your screen is too big or too small, you can try setting the resolution manually. Let's take a look at how you can change the resolution in Ubuntu through the following article!

Change resolution in Display Settings

The resolution setting is found under Display Settings . To access Display Settings, right-click on the screen and select Display Settings.

From there, click the Resolution option and choose your monitor's native resolution.

Use XRandR

You can also set your resolution via the xrandr command, which is included with most modern Linux distributions. Try typing xrandr into Terminal, press Enter, and a bunch of information about the screen and its resolution will appear. The active resolution will have an asterisk next to it.

How to change screen resolution in Ubuntu Picture 1

Note the screen's alias (name) in the information that appears immediately after the command, before the list of resolutions. In this case, since the example used VMware to take a screenshot, the name here is 'Virtual1'.

To choose a different resolution, you can tell xrandr which monitor to target and which resolution to apply:

xrandr --output MONITOR_ALIAS --mode SUPPORTED_RESOLUTION

You can choose any supported resolution, even if it's not a monitor-specific resolution. The command looks like this:

xrandr --output Virtual1 --mode 1440x900

If the exact resolution isn't detected or you want to use a custom resolution for whatever reason, xrandr can help with that too. You should not, however, deviate from VESA standards, although cvt is here to help you with that.

Also available by default in almost every distribution, cvt can compute the VESA Coordinated Video Timing modes. Using it is simple: Enter cvt followed by the desired horizontal and vertical resolution. To calculate the parameters for a resolution of 1500 × 900 (not the standard option), enter:

cvt 1500 900

Select and copy to clipboard everything from Modeline to the end.

How to change screen resolution in Ubuntu Picture 2

Then use it to create a new resolution from scratch with xrandr:

xrandr --newmode CLIPBOARD_CONTENTS

Note that 1504x900_60.00 in this case refers to the desired (virtual) screen resolution and refresh rate but is the name automatically generated by cvt. You are free to change it to whatever you want for convenience. Posts used:

xrandr --newmode "MyMode" 111.00 1504 1592 1744 1984 900 903 913 934 -hsync +vsync

That's not all because you also have to add a new mode as an option for that particular monitor. You can do that with:

xrandr --addmode MONITOR_ALIAS "NAME_OF_XRANDR-CREATED_MODE"

So, according to everything seen so far, the command should look like this:

xrandr --addmode Virtual1 "MyMode"

Then the new resolution can be selected from Display Settings.

If your desktop continues to get stuck at the incorrect resolution, it may be time to upgrade your GPU driver.

Samuel Daniel

Update 17 September 2020