The NVIDIA EDID Problem & Solution

[howard]

This is a problem that a lot of people seem to have with the NVIDIA
proprietary drivers (the driver from NVIDIA website). And after many
hours of struggling with it I have found a solution, thanks to a few
websites and a helper.

If you are like me, then you downloaded the latest driver from nvidia
for your linux architecture. Installed just fine, and rebooted. Now
you've hit a wall because you can't get the thing out of 800x600 px (or
something smaller) resolution. You check the Xorg.0.log for any errors
(EE), but find none of any importance. Upon further inspection I found a
warning that complained about my EDID being invalid, and then shortly
after that error it told me it couldn't find a matching "1280x1024" mode
to set my resolution to. This is because it can't read the EDID of my
monitor.

So the solution to sed problem:
Download Phoenix EDID Designer.

If you have windows on the same computer, then boot to windows and run
the designer. If you don't have windows on the same machine, I've heard
it is capable of doing the same job under wine. Although I would imagine
you could hook up the monitor to a machine that is running windows for
this part and get the same results.

Click "Tools -> Extract Registry EDID".
Select the listing that appears for the correct monitor, and click
"Extract EDID".
Click "File -> Export" and export it as edid.raw

Now boot your computer back into the problem causing OS, and copy the
edid.raw file to "/etc/X11". Now edit your xorg.conf file
(/etc/X11/xorg.conf you will need super user priviledges for this part).
Add the following line to the Device section:
Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:/etc/X11/edid.raw"

Now restart X and your preferred resolution should be displayed. Note
that you may need to change "DFP-0" to something else depending on which
device you noticed X complained about in your Xorg.0.log file.