Found my notes on how to turn off overscanning on a (Samsung) TV used as a monitor -- the instructions I found weren't for my exact model, but I figured it out:

I have a Samsung J5205 TV which would lose the edges of the window when a window was maximized. Samsung Tech Support wasn't able to help me but I found that this is a common issue with TV's due to overscanning -- it has to be disabled for PC's. Once I found that, I searched on how to disable it for this model TV and found an article on a similar TV at http://www.storageforum.net/forum/showthread.php/8905-How-to-Disable-overscan-on-a-Samsung-quot-SMART-quot-tv-solved

to fix the issue: I had to press the source button on my remote, press the tools button, then select "Edit Name" and select PC from the list.

this disabled the overscanning and solved my problem.

On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 2:48 PM, Victor Odhner <vodhner@cox.net> wrote:

Thanks, all.

I ran out of time to play with the VGA connection, although I might have done better by fixing the typos that were pointed out to me.

I concluded that I should simply get with current technology and go all HDMI. That same monitor/TV automatically came up on 1080p, rock solid.

I’ve learned that the VGA connection is effectively a different monitor. It’s good that we have xrandr and that we can hack so freely in Linux, but that doesn’t fit the project I’m working which may be supported by its busy users.

As for my KVM, I can pair that other computer with my personal PC instead, since it was for my occasional use and 1024x768 is fine.

BTW, the KVMs for HDMI run $50.

Thanks Again,
Victor
_________________

On 20180302, at 11:59, Matt Graham <mhgraham@crow202.org> wrote:

On 2018-03-01 17:47, Richard Wilson wrote:
On SouthPole, if the screen resolution doesn't come up as 1280x1024,
then as root
use xrandr to get the display name:

xrandr should be usable by whoever's running the current X session. At least, I've never needed root to use xrandr.

[snip stuff that sounds correct and will probably work]
More recently I am also using a TV as a monitor -- I had to jump
through some hoops to disable overscanning on the HDMI port

"xrandr --output HDMI-1 --set underscan on" should work. The man page doesn't totally make that clear, but that's what worked for me. Confusingly enough, you can usually set one of a TV's HDMI inputs to something like "PC mode" where it'll expect input without overscan. This causes trouble if you plug other HDMI sources into that port, since many/most of these output overscanned video by default.

--
Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress
There is no Darkness in Eternity
But only Light too dim for us to see.
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