How to change screen resolution on Ubuntu

There are cases when screen resolution doesn't get adjusted automatically after installing a new monitor on your computer.

This happens mostly because of faulty drivers, or when wrong drivers are in use. However, sometimes you need to adjust screen resolution manually in order to make the monitor usable.

Adjusting screen resolution on Ubuntu, can be done by using terminal or GUI.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to change screen resolution on Ubuntu

Change screen resolution using Terminal

Before setting a new screen resolution, you need to check what your current screen resolution is. You can use xrandr tool to check the current screen resolution

xrandr

And you should see a similar output on your terminal. For example, our screen resolution is 1440x900.

Now, before you add a new mode using xrandr, first you need to make sure you have the correct cvt config. Run the command below to get the cvt config for the screen resolution that you want to set

cvt 1366 768 60

Note: 1366 is the screen width, 768 is the screen height and 60 is the refresh rate.

Now once you run the cvt command above, it will give you the config of 1366x768 screen resolution, you need to copy the config as marked in the image below

"1366x768_60.00"  85.25 1368 1440 1576 1784 768 771 781 798 -hsync +vsync

and create the new mode with your config

xrandr --newmode "1366x768_60.00"  85.25 1368 1440 1576 1784 768 771 781 798 -hsync +vsync

Next, add the screen resolution to your monitor

xrandr --addmode XWAYLAND0 "1366x768_60.00"

Replace : XWAYLAND0 with your monitor

Now you should be able to use the new resolution by running the command below

xrandr --output XWAYLAND0 --mode 1360x768_60.00

Make the new resolution permanent

To make changes permanent, so that the resolution that you added stays active, you need to add the following commands on your ~/.profile

First open ~/.profile with a text editor

sudo nano ~/.profile

Next, add the commands below to your ~/.profile file

xrandr --newmode "1366x768_60.00"  85.25 1368 1440 1576 1784 768 771 781 798 -hsync +vsync
xrandr --addmode XWAYLAND0 "1366x768_60.00"

And the ~./profile file should look like this

Finally, press CTRL + X to save changes you made.

Change screen resolution using GUI

Launch Applications menu by clicking to "Show Apps" button

Next, go to Settings

In the settings window, click to "Displays"

As you can see, the current screen resolution is set to 1360x768, to set another resolution simply click over it

Clicking over screen resolution will open a drop down menu, from where you can select any screen resolution that is supported.

Once you have changed the screen resolution, click to "Apply" button to save changes

Next, you will see the following confirmation prompt. Click to "Keep Changes" button to activate the new screen resolution that you selected

Now you should be able to use the new screen resolution.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you learned how to change the resolution of your screen by using Terminal and GUI.