Dell 2005FPW Display Resolution Fix
I have an old Dell 2005FPW LCD display from around 2005. I had some problems getting this to display the native 1680x1050 resolution in Linux. Instead it would always want to display 1280x1024, and everything would look ugly. The cause of this seems to be bad EDID data being sent by the monitor, because I managed to fix it by manually creating a EDID firmware file with a resolution of 1680x1050 and the refresh rate forced to 59Hz, instead of the more common 60Hz.
There is a nice piece of software here on GitHub to create EDID firmware files from X modeline configuration. I used this together with this handy Online modeline generator.
Here is the modeline generated from the online tool:
# 1680x1050 @ 59.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 64.07 kHz; pclk: 144.55 MHz
Modeline "1680x1050_59.00" 144.55 1680 1784 1968 2256 1050 1051 1054 1086 -HSync +Vsync
I had to trim away the excess ".00" from the string, or else the EDID firwmare file would be too big, 131 bytes instead of 128 bytes, so this should be the actual input to the 'modeline2edid' tool in the EDID generator package:
Modeline "1680x1050_59" 144.55 1680 1784 1968 2256 1050 1051 1054 1086 -HSync +Vsync
For reference, here is a hexdump of the newly created EDID firmware:
00000000 00 ff ff ff ff ff ff 00 31 d8 00 00 00 00 00 00 |.ÿÿÿÿÿÿ.1Ø......|
00000010 05 16 01 03 6d 2b 1b 78 ea 5e c0 a4 59 4a 98 25 |....m+.xê^À¤YJ.%|
00000020 20 50 54 00 00 00 b3 00 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 | PT...³.........|
00000030 01 01 01 01 01 01 77 38 90 40 62 1a 24 40 68 b8 |......w8.@b.$@h¸|
00000040 13 00 b5 11 11 00 00 1e 00 00 00 ff 00 4c 69 6e |..µ........ÿ.Lin|
00000050 75 78 20 23 30 0a 20 20 20 20 00 00 00 fd 00 3b |ux #0. ...ý.;|
00000060 3d 3f 41 0f 00 0a 20 20 20 20 20 20 00 00 00 fc |=?A... ...ü|
00000070 00 31 36 38 30 78 31 30 35 30 5f 35 39 0a 00 e1 |.1680x1050_59..á|
The file needs to be loaded by putting it in /lib/firmware/edid/ and adding this to the Linux boot kernel parameters:
drm.edid_firmware=edid/1680x1050.bin
After this, the resolution became correct in both the framebuffer console and X on the computer where I use this LCD display. The computer has a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 graphics gard with the "nouveau" driver in use.