Adventures with my Eee - Part 2

In March I bought an Asus Eee, one of the models with a 7-inch screen. In October I replaced its operating system with a special Eee version of Ubuntu. Here is what its interface looks like. This week I got around to trying to use the 24-inch Dell monitor as a display for the Eee. This turned out to be somewhat more complicated that I had expected. It had worked easily with the Xandros that came with the machine, so I had not been expecting problems. However, if I plugged in the monitor before starting Ubuntu, the display (on the Eee as well as the monitor) went completely berserk. The Eee's display was apparently attempting to fit the monitor's resolution (so most of the display didn't fit into the available area), and the external monitor was completely unreadable, with horizontal lines of colour jumping around. After much mucking around, I found a sequence that works for me:

1. With the video cable (to the external monitor) disconnected, turn on Eee, boot Ubuntu.
2. Connect the video cable to the external monitor.
3. On the Eee, go to Preferences -> Screen Resolution.
4. Click Detect Displays. Set Resolution to 800x600.
5. Click Apply. Answer "yes" to "Keep settings?" External monitor will come on.
6. Close Settings window.

So far I haven't found a way around having to do this each time I try to use the Eee with the external monitor. However, I don't often want to do this, so it's not a big drama and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on finding a better way. The next upgrade of the operating system may change it all anyway... or perhaps I'll try out one of the other flavours of Ubuntu for the Eee. Here's a photo of the Eee running the big monitor.