A while back, my mom's LED-lit LCD monitor unfortunately broke, so she took
my dad's old fluorescent-lit LCD monitor rather than buying a new one.
Now, this old monitor she now uses is extremely weird. On Windows XP, it
works without issue, but:
- Windows refuses to only show resolutions the monitor supports.
- on Linux Mint 12, which she uses, the monitor works, but the OS apparently
detects 1024x768 as the native resolution of the monitor, rather than the
correct 1280x1024, because 1280x1024 is not listed as an option.
- on GRUB, the monitor will work, but I had to change the settings at first
because it chooses a display mode that the monitor doesn't display by
default.
I should note that 640x480 at 24-bit color mode works fine on Windows and
Linux Mint (refresh rate is 59.9 Hz on Mint apparently, but I don't know for
Windows).
My mom is not dependent on nonfree components of Linux Mint (she uses Flash,
but only for YouTube), and she's due for a system update soon (when Mint 12
falls out of support), so I wanted to show her Trisquel 6 when it comes out
and see if she's interested in the upgrade. But when I booted a Trisquel 5.5
Live CD to see how well it works, about the same thing happened as what
happens with GRUB: the display mode chosen when it got to a graphical part is
not supported by the monitor.
I'm not familiar with how anything graphical (such as X) works or how the OS
figures out what resolutions the monitor can display, so I have some
questions:
What would potentially cause the behavior I've described? Could there be some
nonfree software dependency involved?
How could this problem in theory be worked around? I'm not familiar with how
to start the graphical stuff or really how to do much of anything nontrivial
in text mode. Also, my mom is extremely prone to panicking if it looks like
something goes wrong, so I don't want to make any mistakes here. Also, my mom
isn't interested in getting a new monitor unless she absolutely has to (i.e.
the monitor she currently uses breaks), so getting a new monitor, while I
would prefer it, is not an option now.
