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At work I have a Samsung SyncMaster 213T that I connect my laptop to as a second display. It has been driving me crazy that I could only select 1024x768 or 1360x768 as screen resolutions while the native resolution is 1600x1200. Not only was this below the native resolution but as a result the displayed images would wiggle and just make my eyes sore by the day's end. The temporary solution to this problem turned out to be very simple.

First you need to add a new mode to the configuration, this can simply be done by executing the following.

# cvt 1600 1200

The previous command will result in the following output.

# 1600x1200 59.87 Hz (CVT 1.92M3) hsync: 74.54 kHz; pclk: 161.00 MHz
Modeline "1600x1200_60.00"  161.00  1600 1712 1880 2160  1200 1203 1207 1245 -hsync +vsync

Now copy the output from "Modeline" forward and add to the end of xrandr --newmode as in the following issue.

# xrandr --newmode "1600x1200_60.00"  161.00  1600 1712 1880 2160  1200 1203 1207 1245 -hsync +vsync

Now you need to add this new mode to a display on your system. You can get a list of available displays by issuing xrandr -q. The previous command lists out the available displays, my computer had "VGA-0," "DVI-0," and "S-VIDEO." The interface I wanted to add the new resolution to was "VGA-0" so I issued the following command.

xrandr --addmode VGA-0 1600x1200_60.00

Note that the mode I added is the same as the string in quotes that resulted from the cvt command.

Now you should be able to go through your normal means of selecting screen resolutions to set you new resolution.

To summarize here are the final commands that I will use until I make the settings persistent.

# xrandr --newmode "1600x1200"  161.00  1600 1712 1880 2160  1200 1203 1207 1245 -hsync +vsync && xrandr --addmode VGA-0 1600x1200