Tiny display output issue

[Trojan90]

Hi,

My Windows install on my desktop became hopelessly corrupted and I thought I would use this as an opportunity to switch to Linux.

I have various OS’s on usb drives that I have used to try Linux on an old laptop and the ones I have all work fine when they are installed on my laptop.

Unfortunately when I try some of them on my desktop the video output is only about the size of 2 playing cards side by side. The monitor is using DisplayPort and the operating systems show the message ‘unknown display’ and all options are greyed out.

The OS’s that work fine (display is full size) are LMDE5, LinuxMint 20.3 and MX Linux 21.1.

The OS’s that have a tiny display output are LMDE6, LinuxMint 22 and the current (today) version of Bazzite.

I can’t seem to find any similar issues posted anywhere, all display issues seem to hinge on Nvidia hardware but I have AMD CPU and GPU.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[KGIII]

My first guess would be that it's a driver issue. The versions that don't work are using a different driver than the versions that are working.

In those cases, did you try them long enough to update the software and reboot?

Otherwise, you may need to dig into the drivers themselves. Helpers will likely need to know about your computer, like which graphics card you're using.

 

[osprey]

Hi,

My Windows install on my desktop became hopelessly corrupted and I thought I would use this as an opportunity to switch to Linux.

I have various OS’s on usb drives that I have used to try Linux on an old laptop and the ones I have all work fine when they are installed on my laptop.

Unfortunately when I try some of them on my desktop the video output is only about the size of 2 playing cards side by side. The monitor is using DisplayPort and the operating systems show the message ‘unknown display’ and all options are greyed out.

The OS’s that work fine (display is full size) are LMDE5, LinuxMint 20.3 and MX Linux 21.1.

The OS’s that have a tiny display output are LMDE6, LinuxMint 22 and the current (today) version of Bazzite.

I can’t seem to find any similar issues posted anywhere, all display issues seem to hinge on Nvidia hardware but I have AMD CPU and GPU.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Presumably the machine is running X, since LMDE still runs X by default AIUI.

The output of the following command from a terminal will show the card details and the driver:

lspci -nnk | grep -i vga -A3

If you could paste the results here in code tags it should help readers.

It may be possible to adjust the screen resolution with the xrandr command in the first instance, so that's probably a good first step to see if it works. Something like the following may be useful.

First run:

$ xrandr

On a machine here the output looks like the following, with some details snipped out:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
DVI-D-1 disconnected primary (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 527mm x 296mm
   1920x1080     60.00*+  74.97    59.96    50.00    59.94    59.93
   1680x1050     59.95    59.88
   1400x1050     74.76    59.98
  <snip>

The asterisk * shows that the default resolution on this machine is 1920x1080, and it's running from the HDMI connection. If you can show the output of the xrandr command on your machine with the installation that has the small resolution, readers may be able to propose an appropriate command to try and change it.

 

[PuppyHome]

In the case of Mint 22: It comes with a 'driver manager' to be found in the menu. (Administration --> driver Manager.
Try and run that and see if indeed some drivers are missing.

 

[Trojan90]

Hi All,

Wow, thank you for all the responses.

Yes, I managed to fully update LinuxMint 22 and do a reboot or 2. Once fully updated when going into Driver Manager I got the message that no updates were required.

My hardware is 7700x CPU and 7900 GPU.

I kind of needed a PC so made the call to try and run with LinuxMint 20.3 but unfortunately it would not connect to any repository and even FireFox wouldn’t work so bit the bullet and reinstalled a non open source OS again (which itself wouldn’t connect to the internet and was BSODing during the three installation attempts until I found the original issue and managed to download the LAN drivers for my motherboard). This ordeal took from 9am to 1:40 am until I had a working PC again and I discovered that the original issue was a faulty stick of RAM (the one in the picture).

I can’t bring myself to risk breaking my install again at the moment but I am committed to at least dual booting some time in the future. I really appreciate everyone taking their time to respond to my question.

Cheers,
T

 

[KGIII]

I can’t bring myself to risk breaking my install again at the moment but I am committed to at least dual booting some time in the future. I really appreciate everyone taking their time to respond to my question.

You can also use a virtual machine in the interim, specifically to help you get used to using Linux. VirtualBox is a pretty good application that's also free.