Large Resoltion Desktop

[Tahaan]

Good day.

I need to take a screenshot but I want to have it at a fairly large resolution - I imagine 4000x4000 would be good enough for my requirements (large printing).

Obviously my screen can not handle such a large resolution. In the olden days desktop resolution used to be a separate thing compared to screen/viewport resolution. But I have not seen separate viewport / desktop resolution settings in years. How do I configure a desktop (as opposed to screen/viewport) with a large resolution in this modern era?

I am using KDE 4.10 on Kubuntu 13.04. My physical screen resolution on this laptop is 1366x768.

[Tahaan]

I found the solution. I used better google keywords and combined information from a couple of blog posts and forum questions: The correct termimnology is "virtual desktop size", and it is now easy to use, no more editing of xorg.conf, which in any case probably doesn't exist unless you explicitly created it.

One small gotcha: On my system enabling a large desktop did not play nice with Compositing. You can toggle Compositing off with Alt-Shift-F12 if you experience problems like tearing and/or partial screen updates.

To change the virtual desktop with a size larger than your screen display size you use xrandr to set up a panning desktop.

First find the name of your actual "output device", using the command
xrandr -q

You should see something similar to this:

tahaan@probook:~$ xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1366 x 768, maximum 32767 x 32767
LVDS1 connected 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 193mm panning 1366x768+0+0
   1366x768       60.0*+
   1360x768       59.8     60.0  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3     56.2  
   640x480        59.9  
VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI3 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP3 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

Look for the "Connected" output. In my case it is named LVDS1 so that is what I use in the next command.

The command to adjust the virtual display size with panning is

xrandr --output LVDS1 --panning 1500x900

I highly recommend that you first use values which are only slightly larger than your actual screen resolution and get the hang of the panning. Going straight to 32000x32000 may be problematic!

To disable panning you can use 0x0 as resoltion, eg

xrandr --output LVDS1 --panning 0x0

[Teunis]

Thanks for this tutorial, I'm sure it's one day going to help others.

[SteveRiley]

Moved to the How-To subforum.