Samsung SyncMaster 940BW

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Samsung SyncMaster 940BW running externaly on my IBM ThinkPad R52 (i915) running Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10)

March 16th, 2007 by aizatto

So I’ve had my Samsung SyncMaster 940BW for a while now. Initially trying to get it work on my Ubuntu setup, but no game.

I finally took the time today to get it working as I desperately need the extra space to monitor some stuff. So nice having the additional 1,296,000 pixels. So with my original laptop resolution of 1024×768 (786,432), I get 2,082,432 pixels! Of course it doesn’t really work like that…

Anyways, the catch. What did I do?

Well my first try was merging the old dual monitor setup with the created xorg.conf by openSUSE 10.2 in hopes of getting some sort of Frankenstein working.

Which didnt…

As many of you can guess, my next approach was Google, and lucky for me, a good thread appeared, with a very good post highlighting how to get it working. Now I won’t reiterate the details here, so you better go there and check it out yourself.

The key to getting it working was the 915resolution tool. Basically I need to modify my video BIOS to support the 1440×900 resolution. This change is only temporary, and doesn’t carry through through restarts. /usr/share/doc/915resolution/README.Debian covers how to handle it.
The resulting xorg.conf was slightly different (modelines) than my openSUSE 10.2 one. Of course, one is running on an i915 and another an nvidia 6200.

Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 (i915):

Modeline “1440×900″ 106.5 1440 1520 1672 1904 900 903 909 931

openSUSE 10.2 (nvidia 6200):

Modeline “1440×900″ 104.58 1440 1520 1672 1904 900 901 904 931

Anyways, its time for me to enjoy my nice LCD :3.

Now suspend to RAM works, but hibernate doesn’t … it brings up my laptop LCD, but the external LCD is greyed out. I have to go run the 915resolution tool again, and restart X. Now onto a solution!

Related files:

Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10 xorg.conf

Post in IBM ThinkPad R52, Samsung SyncMaster 940BW, Ubuntu 1 Comment

February 14th, 2007 by aizatto

My old crt was acting a bit funny lately and stopped working completely. Thinking I could either:

Repair it
Purchase a replacement

With winning the eGenting competition I thought, I could splurge a bit for a change, and purchase myself a new toy.

I’ve been eyeing LCDs for a long while, because they look oh so beautiful, especially the Samsung ones. So with the need for a new display, and with a bit of extra mula in hand. I caved in and got myself a nice Samsung SyncMaster 940BW, a 19″ widescreen LCD at less than 740RM (got discount mah). The technical specifications on ‘Features‘ page isn’t correct, though under the ‘Specifications‘ page, its fine. Another problem I’ve encountered is during the warranty registration on their site, sadly the page doesn’t seem to work in Firefox 2 (haven’t tested other versions), both on Linux and Windows. Thus I had to resort to Internet Explorer to remedy this. I’ve sent Samsung an email regarding this, I hope it works soon.

Other LCD options included sizes in the 20″ and 22″ range, but I couldn’t justify the extra money for it.

I’ve had a bit of trouble setting it up on my spare computer, running Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Messed around with my xorg.conf but I got somewhere after a bit of googling. But it still wasn’t perfect. Tried both through manually modifying xorg.conf, and through dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.

Because I needed to install OpenSUSE 10.2, I decided to let OpenSUSE have a shot at configuring it, and lucky for me, it worked!

So now I have a 1440×900 of desktop real estate! Thats 1,296,000 pixels!

I opted for a wide screen version as most (if not all) sites, documents, etc are vertically oriented. The widescreen allows me to run 2 if not more windows to utilize, side by side.

Related files: