Unkown display causing elongated screenshot

Question

I'm facing some problems with the display. I had this previously but I cannot exactly remember how I solved it then... Okay here is the thing: What have I tired, didn't work this time:

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/398903/unknown-display-besides-laptop-built-in-display-old-question-but-with-no-answer
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/362081/two-monitors-when-only-having-one-in-13-10
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/283018/ubuntu-detects-2-monitors-when-i-only-have-one

Some important outputs:

$ lspci | grep -i vga

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108M [GeForce GT 525M] (rev a1)

$ ls /sys/class/drm

card0  card0-DP-1  card0-HDMI-A-1  card0-LVDS-1  card0-VGA-1  card1  card1-HDMI-A-2  card1-VGA-2  renderD128  renderD129  version

$ xrandr | grep " connected " | awk '{ print$1 }'

VGA-0
LVDS-1-1

$ xrandr -q

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 2390 x 768, maximum 16384 x 16384
VGA-0 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768      60.00*+
   1600x900      59.82  
   1400x900      59.88  
...
HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS-1-1 connected primary 1366x768+1024+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
   1366x768      59.64*+
   1360x768      59.80    59.96  
   1280x720      60.00    59.99    59.86    59.74  
   1024x768      60.04    60.00  
...
VGA-1-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-1-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
  1360x768 (0x47) 84.750MHz -HSync +VSync
        h: width  1360 start 1432 end 1568 total 1776 skew    0 clock  47.72KHz
        v: height  768 start  771 end  781 total  798           clock  59.80H

$ cat /etc/default/grub

...
GRUB_DEFAULT="0"
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE="hidden"
GRUB_TIMEOUT="-1"
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="video=VGA-1:d"
...

Here is my primary graphic driver info:

The greeter (login screen) is also affected it would hide if I move the cursor to the elongated / extended screen.

Can anyone help me with this?

Answer 1

It has been a long time since I posted the question.

Workaround

As a workaround up until now I purged all the NVIDIA drivers and installed and added video=VGA-1:d this the grub file, which seemed to work fine.

Possible Solution

Yesterday I had to clean up my system completely. So after a fresh install of elementary OS (from: elementaryos-5.1-stable.20200603.iso) not surprisingly I got this:

Remember this time my grub file is new and has no modifications. So I upgraded the system sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade. Then I installed the Ubuntu drivers with:

$ sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

It automatically installed all the necessary drivers (including NVIDIA GeForce driver v390.18)

Rebooted and bingo! It worked like charm.

Info Outputs

$ lspci | grep -i vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108M [GeForce GT 525M] (rev a1)

$ ls /sys/class/drm
card0  card0-DP-1  card0-HDMI-A-1  card0-LVDS-1  card0-VGA-1  card1  renderD128  renderD129  version

$ xrandr | grep " connected " | awk '{ print$1 }'
LVDS-1-1

$ xrandr -q
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1366 x 768, maximum 16384 x 16384
HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
LVDS-1-1 connected primary 1366x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
   1366x768      59.64*+
   1360x768      59.80    59.96  
   1280x720      60.00    59.99    59.86    59.74  
   1024x768      60.04    60.00  
...
VGA-1-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-1-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

$ cat /etc/default/grub
...
GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
GRUB_TIMEOUT=-1
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
...

Some observations

• Parallelly I had installed Linux Lite 5.0 (Ubuntu base 20.04 & kernel 5.4.x). It did not show any such problems.
• Neither was it seen on Parrot OS (well... it's not Ubuntu based, so probably of less relevance in this context).
• I installed elementary OS on other systems with newer NVIDIA integrated as well as dedicated cards and non of them had this problem.

So probably Bionic Beaver has some grudge with NVIDIA GeForce 525M. Haha.