Need to Adjust Screen Resolution in 14.04

**BlacklightHalo** · January 27th, 2015

Hi everyone,

I am trying to use a television monitor (a Panasonic Viera) as my computer monitor. I switched from my old, smaller square screen to this widescreen monitor. However, now the screen's resolution seems to be off-balance. It's like the computer is putting the picture a little under an inch too high on the screen. Here are two pictures. The first is taken with screencap, showing what the computer can see of its display.

Screencap.jpeg

The second was taken with my tablet camera, and shows how it looks to me.

Screencap II.jpg

As you can see, the taskbar is too high and a portion of the top of the screen seems to be "shoved" up above the actual screen. The display behaves this way as soon as I turn-on the computer (in other words, it doesn't only start doing this when I begin a session, or reach the login screen, etc.) From the fact that the screencaptured image doesn't show any discrepancy, I deduce that the computer cannot tell that it's making a display mistake. I have tried "System Settings> Display & Monitor> Display Configuration," including adjusting the resolution to any available presets. The ones other than the one I'm using in the pictures (which the computer says is 1024x768) look much, much further off. I have also tried adjusting the Screen Edge using "Panel Options> Panel Settings," and have found that the display will move further up, but not down (which once again leads me to believe that the computer cannot see something or other here.) When I open up a window (like Firefox, or Dolphin) the Titlebars appear above the top of the screen (I have to hunt-around for them with the mouse.) The mouse will go above the display and below it, and disappears above or below the screen either way.

There also seems to be no option in the monitor's native menu for adjusting things in this way.

Does anyone know of a way to reconcile the screen's dimensions with the computer's display?

**BlacklightHalo** · January 27th, 2015

*I have also hunted around online to see if there is any way to solve this problem, but everyone seems to be talking about the font sizes, not the actual display position.

**grahammechanical** · January 28th, 2015

What kind of a connection are you using to connect the graphic adapter to the TV? The standard VGA connection is not good enough for modern digital TV/Monitors. I found this out recently when I purchased a digital TV to use as a monitor. I have a VGA cable and a DVI cable but the TV only had VGA and HDMI connectors. So, I used the VGA cable and I could not get the full resolutions available from the monitor. I did not have the particular problem that you had. I then purchased a HDMI cable and now every thing is much better and running at the correct resolutions.

Regards.

**BlacklightHalo** · January 28th, 2015

I'm using an HD15 connector. Looks like this. It seems this is a VGA connector, then. I will have to check and see if my tower has an HDMI connection. I'll write back when I find out later today. Thanks for your input. =)

*Edit - I just remembered that I tried connecting this monitor to a much older computer tower with Ubuntu Lucid (I think it was Lucid) installed, with the same HD15 connection, and in that case this didn't happen. Does that mean the connector cable isn't the problem? Also, my tower doesn't have an HDMI output (or input for that matter.) It only has DVI and HD15.

If a VGA cable were necessarily not enough for a proper connection between a television and a computer, why would the company build a VGA input into the monitor?