Changing screen resolution interactively (breezy)

[Toby Kelsey]

Problem:

I wanted to be able to change screen resolutions interactively (to make viewing videos easier).
There seemed to be two ways of doing this
1) with an applet: from "Add to Panel", select Display Geometry Switcher [Grandr]
2) via menus: System > Preferences > Screen Resolution [gnome-display-properties]
but the problem was that after switching to a low resolution, most of the menus and applets
were off the screen and inaccessible with the mouse.  I could run gnome-display-properties
directly but there can be problems with the window placement.  Since I was using a terminal
to run mplayer anyway, the best solution would be a CLI command.

Solution:

I foud 'xrandr' does the job (from the package with the same name).  Trying 'man -k resolution'
will not find it unfortunately.  Since the man page is inadequate, here are the commands I use:

'xrandr -q' lists and numbers the available resolutions (the current one is starred).
'xrandr -s num -r rate' selects resolution number <num> at <rate> Hz

I hope Dapper has better documentation for this command.

HTH,
Toby