Samsung LN32A450, nVidia Drivers, and Ubuntu

I just recently purchased a Samsung LN32A450 television and wanted to use it as a monitor. I figured that it shouldn’t be too hard, just plug in my computer to it’s VGA port and then change the resolution.

But, when are new things ever easy?

To make a long story short, I had to generate a custom modeline for X to be able to use the TV’s native resolution, 1360×768. I read to use the command cvt 1360 768 60.015Hz, but the returned modeline resulted in a “Mode Not Supported” error from the TV. Instead, I had to use a Windows program called PowerStrip to grab the custom timings that actually worked. Though, the only reason they worked was by luck because Windows didn’t properly detect the monitor either, so I used PowerStrip to add a custom resolution to my registry which was preset with working timings.

Anyway, PowerStrip was nice enough to generate an xorg.conf modeline for me and had to edit the following in my file (this is assuming that you already have the proprietary nVidia drivers already working):

…

Section "Monitor"
    …
    Modeline "1360x768" 85.500 1360 1440 1552 1792 768 771 777 795 +hsync +vsync
EndSection

…

Section "Screen"
    …
    SubSection "Display"
        Depth  24
        Virtual 1360 768
        Modes "1360x768"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

…

Note: any ellipses (…) in the above are just cutting out parts that were not changed in my file.

UPDATE: I figured that I would make a note that I recently tried getting a new computer to work with this television and didn’t have as much luck. The new computer was using an ATI Radeon 4850 rather than the nVidia card that I got working previously. Ultimately, I couldn’t get the VGA out to work and had to switch to using an HDMI connection. After I did that, Ubuntu 8.10 (the same OS that I was using previously) automatically detected the native resolution of this TV. Therefore, I recommend using HDMI over VGA to get this TV to work in Linux.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 2:43 am and is filed under Announcement, Planet COSI, Programming, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.