Comment 5 for bug 769366

It's actually not as simple as that; resolutions are not just pluggable numbers, but are actually calculated from 'modelines' which describe the physical CRT or LCD drawing behaviors and refresh cycle rates which are fairly specific to a given piece of hardware.

So, you can't take a given 1280x800 modeline for a Sony CRT monitor and reuse it unchanged on a BENQ LCD flatscreen or a Fujitsu laptop; it's likely this would just result in a scrambled screen most of the time.

The only modelines which are *guaranteed* to work on any monitor are the ones specified by the VESA standard. Those are the modelines corresponding to 1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480 - the "poor resolution options" that you're being presented with. Ideally VESA would put out newer standards, however even if they did that wouldn't solve it for all the hw already out there.

One idea we've been pursuing to better address the case of EDID failures is to allow for saving and loading EDID blobs into the kernel. Then, you could either generate an EDID yourself through some sort of tool (e.g. perhaps deriving it from your monitor's setup cd), or save it off the monitor (or get it from someone with the same monitor), and then the system can load it at boot. This is already adequately covered by another bug report and the work is in progress (but no ETA on when it'll be available in the distro.)