Changing screen resolution interactively (breezy)

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 18:01 +0000, Toby Kelsey wrote:
> 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.

This seems like something that should Just Work, rather than requiring
cryptic CLI commands... maybe you can file a bug against
gnome-display-properties?

Lee