Today I got a new screen so I can return to the department the one I took at the beginning of the lockdown. I got exactly the same: BenQ eye-care 27inches, as I’ve been happy with it for the past months.

As the setting up of the new screen takes a bit of time, I’m writing here the steps I followed, to do it faster the next time. Note that I’m using Ubuntu 19.10 (Eoan Ermine), with a KDE desktop.

I connected the screen to my laptop and switch off the laptop screen (eDP-1 in my current system) so I only have the big, external screen on:

xrandr --output eDP-1 --off

eDP-1 refers to my laptop screen, but you can find the name of yours using the command xrandr.

Unfortunatelly, the resolution on my big and brand new screen was wrong and there was no option to change the resolution in the ‘Settings’ menu so I had to change this by hand. I’ve followed the instructions posted by Chirag Bhatia to do the changes on the command line:

  • First find out the specifications of the resolution you think you are targeting, in n my case 1920x1080:
 gtf 1920 1080 60

 # 1920x1080 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 67.08 kHz; pclk: 172.80 MHz Modeline "1920x1080_60.00"  172.80  1920 2040 2248 2576  1080 1081 1084 1118  -HSync +Vsync
  • Declare a new mode with the information obtained with the above command:
 xrandr --newmode "1920x1080_60.00"  172.80  1920 2040 2248 2576  1080 1081 1084 1118  -HSync +Vsync
  • Add the new mode to your output, in my case HDMI-1 (you can see the available names with the xrandr command):
 xrandr --addmode HDMI-1 "1920x1080_60.00"
  • Set the new resolution mode:
 xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode "1920x1080_60.00"

And now I got a crisp display!