MacBook Pro, Ubuntu and the Cinema Display

I’ve got a new laptop – a MacBook Pro. The 13″ model with the i7 CPU and no discrete graphics card from ATI or nvidia. Instead one relies on the graphics card built-in to SandyBridge.

This caused some issues with the Cinema Display that I’ve grown so fond of – and it looked as if a driver hack was needed. But, thanks to my helpful colleague Erik Botö, the magic modeline was found. The trick is to lower the refresh frequency. So, for everyone out there, this does the trick:

xrandr --newmode "1920x1200_45.00" 140.92 1920 2032 2232 2544 1200 1201 1204 1231 -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --addmode DP1 "1920x1200_45.00"
xrandr --output DP1 --mode "1920x1200_45.00"

If you want to, you can skip the last xrandr call and simply use the KDE Display Settings tool. The line above gives you a clone setup, which I prefer at work.