Adding a custom / unlisted resolution in Fedora / CentOS / RHEL

Sometimes I find that xrandr doesn't always advertise all of the supported resolutions for graphic cards - this can sometimes be down to using an unofficial driver or an older one.

However in Fedora the latest drivers are usually bundled in for Intel graphics cards - unfortunately xrandr is only reporting that one resolution is available:

xrandr -q

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1440 x 900, maximum 8192 x 8192
XWAYLAND0 connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
   1440x900      59.75 +

In order to add a custom resolution we can use the 'cvt' utility - this calculates the VESA Coordinated Video Timing modes for us.

The syntax is as follows:

cvt <width> <height> <refreshrate>

for example:

cvt 800 600 60

# 800x600 59.86 Hz (CVT 0.48M3) hsync: 37.35 kHz; pclk: 38.25 MHz

Modeline "800x600_60.00"   38.25  800 832 912 1024  600 603 607 624 -hsync +vsync

We then create a new mode with (appending the above in bold):

sudo xrandr --newmode "800x600_60.00"   38.25  800 832 912 1024  600 603 607 624 -hsync +vsync

and then adding that mode to the display (in our case this is WAYLAND0):

sudo xrandr --addmode VGA-0 800x600_60.00

and then set this mode with:

sudo xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1280x1024_60.00