Comment 3 for bug 820327

Hi,

More information about this issue:

- still happening on an up-to-date Natty

- Problem *does not occur* if gnome-display-properties is running at the time

- The exact symptoms have changed a little, but still shows the same inability to properly set the external monitor

- With gnome-display-properties running, cycling through modes with Fn+F7 looks like this (in order):

Mode Internal External
------------------------------------------------
Spanning Desktop On On
Clone Mode On Broken
Internal Only On Off
External Only Off On
Spanning (again) On Broken

If gnome-display-properties is running, it works properly:

Mode Internal External
------------------------------------------------
Spanning Desktop On On
Clone Mode On On
Internal Only On Off
External Only Off On
Spanning (again) On on

This is on a projector, which doesn't support many modes, so "broken" is basically "black".

When run on a fairly flexible external monitor, I noticed that the resolution/refresh as reported by xrandr does not match the actual resolution of the monitor. In the attached photo, you'll see output of xrandr (white on black) saying the monitor is 1920x1200@60Hz, but the monitor's status menu says it's running 1600x1200@60Hz.

The GNOME desktop believes that the monitor is 1920 pixels wide, so even though there's a picture on the monitor, much of it is missing.

Thanks,
Eric