What determines screen resolution on boot?

Question

I am running a dual-boot configuration with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 on a Dell Studio 1500 with 1900x1080 native resolution. I am using grub2 as the boot manager.

When the computer boots up the screen resolution seems to be lower than native resolution. The 'Loading GRUB...' is really big and the grub menu screen is also looking like it is running at a lower resolution.

What determines the screen resolution on boot? Is there any way to change it?

Answer 1

Do you want the startupmanager package?

Answer 2

The option you need to tweak is GRUB_GFXMODE in /etc/defaults/grub (assuming grub's conf files are the same on ubuntu as they are on debian). Read the comment in the file about how to find the supported modes.