Ubuntu 8.04 And The ATEN CS1734B
Apr 24th, 2008 by Eats Wombats
Ubuntu v8.04 was released today. I wasn’t going to join all the chatter* about it, a lot of which was undoubtedly written in advance, but I had a problem with it that I know someone else will have so I’m posting solution for all affected to find with Google.
I had the Hardy Heron, as this release has been named, running on an old laptop and my Ubuntu desktop PC not long after the downloads completed — clean installs in both cases.
Yes, I experimented with both a torrent and regular download and felt a little guilty about consuming two lots of bandwidth in the first hour. The torrent (using Opera’s built-in torrent support) took forever to get going but then the hare left the tortoise for dead. I expiated any guilt by leaving Opera sharing the download for a few hours.
Everything went well with both installations apart from my Ubuntu desktop PC’s screen resolution being downgraded from 1280×1024 to 1280×800 (on a Samsung Syncmaster 181T). The result looked terrible.
I’ve edited xorg.conf files before but my feeling about delving into that kind of thing is simply: Linux is just not going to make it if this is necessary. This was not supposed to be necessary any more<sigh>.
Naturally, I was a little disappointed.
I considered reverting to the last version and doing an upgrade with apt-get instead of a clean install. However, on a hunch I connected the computer directly to the monitor, bypassing my ATEN CS1734B KVM switch (which I recently reviewed) and tried again to set the resolution with “Detect Displays”. Bingo! 1280×1024.
Strangely, there was no problem detecting the correct maximum resolution with the previous version of Ubuntu with the ATEN switch in place.
*herons are known as chatterin’ birds where I come from, and anyone who has stood under a nest of hungry herons knows why.
Update:
I reported the problem to ATEN and they promised to look into it. They later said “it’s a problem with the monitor.”
Ubuntu detects the monitor correctly and configures the maximum resolution automatically if the ATEN switch isn’t used. When it is used, the display resolution is set incorrectly. But this didn’t happen with Ubuntu 7.10.
It seems to be the combination of Ubuntu 8.04 and this switch, and maybe this monitor. I’ll try Ubuntu 8.10 one of these days.