How to change GNOME Resolution with a command
using terminal or console on Debian GNU / Linux
I'm testing some old school arcade games, available from Debian's
package repositories and quitting one of the games ended me up with
a
GNOME Screen Resolution of
640x480 pixels.
I wanted to revert back to the Classics resolution, so what I would
normally do to do that is
use >GNOME menus:
System -> Preferences ->
Monitors
In that huge screen resolution on my 14 inch lenovo notebook
screen, however the System menu cannot fit in 640x480 resolution.
You can see the non-screen fitting
System on the screenshot
below:
Having this situation, I needed a way to change back to my normal
daily used
1024x768px screen resolution to continue my daily
work by some other way.
One possible solution I thought of was Logging Off Gnome and
logging again. Loggig off and log on again would usually restart
the initiated GNOME session and therefore will reset the screen
resolution to my default
1024x768 / 32 bit color.
Having the unobservable
System gnome panel menu on my screen
however made using the usual Log off procedure via
System ->
Log Out myusername impossible...
Another possible way to actually restart my screen and hence revert
back to my original resolution is achiavable using the classical
restart X server key switch
CTRL + ALT + backspace (bckspc)
. Though this was a possible approach to the situation, I had a
bunch of programs already running on my desktop and I did not
wanted to interrupt my desktop session, what I was looking for is
simply
change the screen resolution size .
With all said I had to look up for alternative way (preferably
easy) way, to
revert back my screen resolution to my desired
1024x768.
As a console guy, I was interested if there is some kind of
possibility to change my GNOME resolution directly using
xterm or
gnome-terminal , after a bit of check up
online, I've found few threads started by people who were looking
just like me for a way to
change GNOME / KDE screen resolution
size on various distributions Linux desktops. The answer to the
question on few places was the command
xrandr which I had
used some few years ago to initiate
remote X server connections
via SSH
xrandr is actually a great tool part of the
x11-xserver-utils
Actually
xrandr is capable of doing a few things besides
setting the screen resolution size, just to name a few it supports
change the screen orientation, reflection of the output of the
screen, adjust brightness, set color gamma etc. etc.
It is good to mention that
xrandr changes the resolution not
on a GNOME level but on Xorg server level.
Using
xrandr to change the screen resolution appeared to be
very easy.
1. First I issued xrandr to check all the supported xrandr
resolutions by my X server hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 8192 x
8192 VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS1 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y
axis) 304mm x 228mm 1024x768 60.0*+ 50.0 800x600 60.3 56.2 640x480
60.0 59.9 TV1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y
axis) hipo@noah:~/Desktop$
From the output you can see I have 3 basic resolutions configured
in my Xorg, I can switch between.
2. To switch to my previous default screen resolution
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ xrandr -s 1024x768
After using
xrandr command to revert back to my default
screen size, I realized there is two other (partially command line
partially gui) way to change to 1024x768 pixels.
3. Through
launching gnome Control Center and searching for
Monitors menu.
If one prefers this way he can;
i) press
ALT+F2 to invoke Gnome's Run Application
dialog
ii) issue
gnome-control-center command:
4. By invoking gnome's Control Panel -> Monitors settings
window by a command
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$
gnome-display-properties