Asus M4a785-m and ntegrated ATI Radeon HD4200 output to 15" VGA Monitor and HDMI-TV

[Tony Pursell]

On Mon, 2010-10-25 at 01:49 -0400, Mike McMullin wrote:
> 
>   I've got a bud who installed 9.04 on his new system (critical details in 
> subject line), and would like to be able to output to both his 15" monitor and 
> HDMI TV, the screen looks almost fine on the 15", but the full desktop is not 
> showing, and on the HDMI-TV you see the middle of the desktop with no upper or 
> lower bars, is there a way to fix this so that the desktop is proper size on 
> both the monitor and the TV?  (Driver file recommendations would be appreciated 
> as well.)
> 

The problem on your TV is due to what is called 'overscan' (Google it!).
TV manufacturers deliberately make the picture bigger than the screen so
you don’t seen the edges.  There is a standard for the position on the
screen that can always be seen so that things like subtitles are always
seen. 

I am not sure how you cope with this for your graphics. On my Acer Revo,
with nVidia graphics, I can use the proprietary driver which gives a
menu entry for my Panasonic Viera TV with an option for Overscan
Correction.  AFAIK there is currently no proprietary driver for ATI
Radeon (like I have on my desktop PC) and I don't know about any GUI for
adjusting the parameters of Open Source drivers. Perhaps now I have
identified the problem, someone else will be able to help.

Tony