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Steve L
Asked: 2018-06-19 19:07:27 +0800 CST

Change display properties

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I have loaded 18.04 onto an old HP Pavilion 23", which doesn't have a display out. I have a USB display adapter, which is working well and I have a Samsung 32" TV that I'm using as a monitor.

When I go to screen display it shows the second monitor as a Samsung 7" and only allows the scale to be 100% or 200%.

I want to reduce the scale to about 50% but cannot find anywhere to do that.

multiple-monitors display scale-mode

1 Answers

  1. You can do it with xrandr to set your monitor to 50% scale. This is not permanently set so you would have to set it into a startup script if you want to keep it that way on every bootup.

    First, get your currently connected monitors with the following command:

    xrandr --current | grep -w connected

    Example:

    xrandr --current | grep -w connected
DVI-I-0 connected 1280x1024+1920+37 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
HDMI-0 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 509mm x 286mm

    Pay attention to the monitor that you want to scale. I am going to scale my second monitor that is attached to my DVI port. 50% is .5; 100% is 1 So we will run the following command to scale to 50%.

    xrandr --output DVI-I-0 --scale .5x.5

    If you want it to change on every startup, add that command to your Settings -> Session and Startup but you might want the command like so to give it a slight delay at startup:

    bash -c 'sleep 5; xrandr --output DVI-I-0 --scale .5x.5'

    To set the monitor back at any time run the following:

    xrandr --output DVI-I-0 --scale 1x1

    Hope this helps!

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