I’ve been running Ubuntu 10.10 for a year or so now and there have been a few times, after installing some updates I presume, where I’ve restarted my computer and suddenly my monitor resolution isn’t recognized. Normally I run the maximum resolution (1920×1010) of my monitor, a Dell P2311H. But on these restarts, my resolution is reduced to 640×480. Very annoying. Now, from what I understand, this is not an issue with Ubuntu per se, but rather the monitor’s failure to send the proper EDID or Extended Display Identification Data for the monitor. Essentially the EDID sends information of what display settings the monitor is capable of, such as refresh rates and resolutions. The basic remedy is to manually enter these settings.
Very recently I had this issue occur to me twice for two separate issues, which is really what’s prompting me to write this post. I don’t want to have to dig through the interwebs again to solve this. So, in my case there were two separate incidents with two different resolutions.
Round 1
The first time my screen resolution was all jacked up, it was because of the “Screen” settings in my xorg.conf, which is located at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
NOTE: be sure to make a backup of xorg.conf before making edits. You don’t want to make matters worse, and there’s no guarantee that this solution is the solution to your problem.
At the bottom of xorg.conf you should see a section labeled “Screen” or something similar to this:
Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Default Depth 24
EndSection
In this section you’ll want to add a subsection labeled “Display” that defines your available screen resolutions, or more importantly a Virtual resolution which appears to server as a setting for the maximum allowable resolution. Edit the “Screen” section to look something like this:
Section “Screen”
Identifier “Default Screen”
Default Depth 24
SubSection “Display”
Virtual 1920 1080
Depth 24
Modes “1920×1080 1680×1050 1344×840 1280×800″
EndSubSection
EndSection
The resolutions you enter should obviously match to available resolutions for your monitor. More importantly the Virtual entry should match you monitor’s maximum resolution, or rather the maximum resolution you intend to use, whichever is smaller.
Now restart xerver. Depending on your default display manager, you can do this by running one of the following commands:
sudo restart lightdm
or
sudo restart gdm
or
sudo restart kdm
You can find out what your default display manager is by looking at the file default-display-manager in the /etc/X11 directory.
After the restart, maybe you’re good, maybe not. On to…
Round 2
The second time my resolution went all wonky on me it was due to the refresh rates. For this edit, we’ll still be working with the xorg.conf file, but we’ll be editing the “Monitor” section. In my case, this section looked like this:
Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Monitor0″
VendorName “Dell”
ModelName “P2311H”
HorizSync 28.0 – 33.0
VertRefresh 43.0 – 72.0
DisplaySize 509.76 286.74
Option “DPMS”
EndSection
The two fields in question are the HorizSync and VertRefresh. You’ll want to change these to whatever your monitor’s refresh rates are. You’ll probably have to do a bit of Googling to figure it out. Of course you could probably just enter in these numbers I have below and see what happens. I believe the worst case scenario would be that Ubuntu would restart without any GUI in which case you’d be stuck in the terminal. So if you’re not comfortable with the Terminal it might not be worth the gamble. Also, in my case DisplaySize looked awfully suspicious and so I removed that line completely.
Again, in my case, the final section looked something like this:
Section “Monitor”
Identifier “Monitor0″
VendorName “Dell”
ModelName “P2311H”
HorizSync 30.0 – 83.0
VertRefresh 56.0 – 76.0
Option “DPMS”
EndSection
Again, restart your display manager as per the instructions from Round 1 and with any luck you should be in business.
After getting Android Notifier working on my machine by installing OBEX, I installed Blueman on my Ubuntu 10.10 machine. I’m not sure why, but Blueman seems to work better with Android than Gnome Bluetooth. I like the interface of Gnome Bluetooth better than Blueman, but I could only get file transfers to run from Android to Ubuntu and not the other way around. Additionally, it’s fairly easy to change the download directory for Bluetooth file transfers to Ubuntu using Blueman. If anyone has a solution to either of these two issues, I’m all ears.
Anyway, back to Android Notifier. Once I installed Blueman, the notifier stopped working. Everything was still paired correctly and all that, but Notifier just wasn’t getting the messages. Turns out, Blueman seems to use an Indicator plugin that hijacks those notifications. Solution? Turn off the Indicator plugin. From what I can tell it doesn’t do much anyway… of course maybe I should retest sending/receiving files from my Nexus.
QUICK ANSWER:
Right click on the Blueman icon in your Notification Area. Select Plugins. And now un-check Indicator from the list on the left side. Done.
Again, I don’t know if there are any adverse effects to turning off Indicator. But I can’t imagine it’ll break anything.
I’ve been using the Android Notifier with my MacBook for some time. If you haven’t checked it out, please do. The application sends notifications to your desktop for everything from incoming texts to a low battery warning to third party notifications. It’s a great little app if you’re into that sort of thing. So when I made my switch to Ubuntu, naturally I wanted to get the Android Notifier working with my new machine.
I won’t get into how the application works or how to pair your phone with Ubuntu. There’s plenty of info on those out there. The issue that I was running into, was with my Nexus S paired and being able to send files to and from Ubuntu, I could not get Android Notifier to pick up on any of my test notifications. When setting up Bluetooth on my computer to allow for file transfers I’d discovered that Android uses OBEX to push and receive file transfers over Bluetooth. So, with this in mind, I decided to investigate how Android Notifier listens for notifications. After checking out the wiki on the project page for Notifier, I found this article regarding the protocols used by Android Notifier (thank you to the Notifier team for posting the documentation on this). Turns out for the Bluetooth connection, Notifier uses a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) when sending notifications.
QUICK ANSWER:
While this may vary between distributions of Linux, on my Ubuntu 10.10 setup, I had to install the UUID command-line tool in order to get Android Notifier working. To do this, run the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install uuid
I hope this helps someone solve their issue using Android Notifier. I’d hate for someone to miss out such a sweet app.