Notes on getting Samsung 205BW monitor to work on Ubuntu Linux

Last update: July 10, 2007

I recently bought a Samsung 205BW, a 20" 1680x1024 monitor --- it was a good choice because it was available at Costco, which allows me to return it easily if I ran into problems. Unfortunately, I did run into serious problems that took the better part of a day to resolve. I came across many articles on the Internet about the problems that I was experiencing, but none of the solutions seemed to work for me --- mainly because most of these articles were missing some details that turned out to be quite important.

BTW, it is a beautiful monitor, once it starts to work!

The symptoms. When using the analog connector, the display seemed fuzzy --- this was true for images as well as fonts. On further examination, I found that X thought it was displaying at 1680x1050, but the monitor reported 1400x1050 or something like that. This is an obvious bad sign. This discussion thread reported this problem. It identified that the problem was that the monitor was providing incorrect information to X about its mode lines. As I understand, this information is provided by DDC-compliant monitors (i.e., practically every monitor available today) using a format called EDID.

The solution. There were several suggested solutions that I could not use. The first one was to patch X server to ignore the erroneous part of EDID information for SAMSUNG monitors, described in the above thread in this article. Unfortunately, it seemed to require a newer version of Xorg than the one that was installed on my machine (Ubuntu 7.04). I didn't want to go through the trouble of upgrading X, since it may break other things. Besides, the procedure for recompiling X wasn't very clear to me.

Several articles suggested modifying xorg.conf to ignore EDID information. Unfortunately, these didn't work when I tried them. After poking around, I realized that the video driver I was using did not support the relevant options to ignore EDID. I found this by searching for strings in the driver. I was using the standard X driver for nvidia cards that came with Ubuntu 7.04.

It turns out that Nvidia's own driver does support the option to ignore EDID. After I installed that driver (using the menu item System --> Administration --> Restricted Device Manager), things began to work. Specifically, I am using this xorg.conf file. It works well, producing crisp text and beautiful colors when using the analog connector. I could not get it to work with DVI connector :-(

My working xorg.conf file is based on the documentation provided with the monitor, and various web pages that provided partially working descriptions, and was arrived at after looking through numerous other pages with suggestions that did not work for me.