Well, in a case like this you will have to settle to the "lowest common denominator", that is, the lowest-highest possible resolution for both of your screens. For example, if your laptop's screen supports 1400x1150, but your external LCD screen only supports 1024x768, then you're stuck with the lower of the two values (1024x768) on both screens.
After some Googling, I found some configurations on this website: and the following comment seems to confirm my suspicion about running different resolution monitors in clone/mirror mode (above paragraph): http://tinyurl.com/yg2xfm "...no example for "Mirror" mode, which is pretty useless if you don't happen to have an external monitor matching the notebook's LCD resolution, i.e. 1400x1050, which I don't." >From what I know, only nVidia cards are capable of having mirrored displays with different resolutions, I don't think ATI supports different resolutions for mirrored monitors (and especially for extended desktops), not even in WIndows. I may be wrong, though, because it's been a while since I haven't used dual-display machines and/or laptops with external monitors for over a year now. With regards to adding support for mirror mode on different resolution monitors, you will have to approach ATI's Linux drivers team with a request for a feature, however, given the nature of display cloning, I don't think you'll get much luck... the whole idea of cloning is to send the exact same signal to both monitors simultaneously, so different resolutions seem to be out of the question. http://preview.tinyurl.com/ycojma I also happen to know, from my laptop experience, that nVidia cards support using the laptop's screen at native resolution, but displaying a lower resolution image. Basically, you get a small rectangular image centered on a higher res screen on a black or grey background. This results in crisper images when the image is lower than native resolution on an LCD screen, because the native resolution is used to draw the image, even though it obviously doesn't take up the full screen. The nVidia drivers have an option to precisely control that behaviour called "FlatPanelProperties". Here's an excerpt from the nVidia Linux binary driver README document for your reference: --- SNIP --- Option "FlatPanelProperties" "string" Requests particular properties of any connected flat panels as a comma-separated list of property=value pairs. Currently, the only two available properties are 'Scaling' and 'Dithering'. The possible values for 'Scaling' are: 'default' (the driver will use whatever scaling state is current), 'native' (the driver will use the flat panel's scaler, if it has one), 'scaled' (the driver will use the NVIDIA scaler, if possible), 'centered' (the driver will center the image, if possible), and 'aspect-scaled' (the driver will scale with the NVIDIA scaler, but keep the aspect ratio correct). The possible values for 'Dithering' are: 'default' (the driver will decide when to dither), 'enabled' (the driver will always dither when possible), and 'disabled' (the driver will never dither). If any property is not specified, it's value shall be 'default'. An example properties string might look like: "Scaling = centered, Dithering = enabled" --- SNIP --- The reason why I'm pointing this out to you, is because the ATI drivers may have something similar, but I'm afraid I'm not as familiar with the fglrx driver, so nothing comes to mind. Reading ATI's documentation might help, though. Please let me know if this adequately addresses your question, as I'd like to close this bug. Well, more of a support request than a bug, really. :) -- fglrx does not start in single screen mode https://launchpad.net/bugs/50428 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
