how can i get widescren display on my new Dell 3010?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2012 19:57:17 -0800 Gary Kline <kline at thought.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 10:41:57AM +0800, Ed Greshko wrote:
> > 
> > You don't have a single monitor connected to 2 systems via a KVM do
> > you?
> 
> 	I do indeed; at one time I had 5 tower cases and three small
> 	CRT's; finally wound up with one 19" tube wired to a KVM
> switch. my goal is to get down to a server and a desktop.  and one 
> 	backup server.

Good catch, Ed! :-)

Gary, the KVM switch is the source of your problems. During bootup, the
computer queries the monitor for supported resolutions. Even if the KVM
switch allows for that communication, only one computer can query the
monitor at one time.

So you should try the following algorithm when booting up your machines:

* turn on the monitor and the KVM switch
* select the first machine (ethos) as active on the KVM
* boot the first machine, to let it pick up the monitor data
* select the second machine (tao) as active on the KVM
* boot the second machine, to let it pick up the monitor data
* select the third machine as active on KVM, etc...

Once all machines have booted up, each of them should automatically
give you the correct resolution.

However, it may happen that the KVM switch doesn't support querying the
monitor at all. In that case, you need to create and
the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to manually force the desired resolution.
But my advice is that you shouldn't do that unless you have no other
choice.

Try to boot the machines sequentially, with each "having" the monitor
for its boot process, and only if that doesn't work we'll discuss the
xorg.conf. My guess is that it will work, since ethos seems to get a
correct resolution while connected through KVM. Does ethos run Fedora
as well? If yes, then KVM dos support querying the monitor.

HTH, :-)
Marko