Once you get your Raspberry Pi booted up and have the monitor plugged in via HDMI, you may need to manually set the resolution to get things looking how they should on your screen. The Raspberry Pi OS makes this pretty easy to do from the GUI menus, and also gives us the option to configure headless resolution for VNC connections. So, even if you do not have a screen plugged into your Raspberry Pi, we can still configure the resolution for remote connections. In this tutorial, you will see how to set the resolution on a Raspberry Pi.
In this tutorial you will learn:
- How to set resolution on Raspberry Pi
- How to set headless resolution (for VNC connection) on Raspberry Pi
| Category | Requirements, Conventions or Software Version Used |
|---|---|
| System | Raspberry Pi |
| Software | N/A |
| Other | Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command. |
| Conventions |
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command$ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user |
Set resolution on Raspberry Pi step by step instructions
Follow the steps below to set the resolution for your monitor on Raspberry Pi. Here we are assuming that you are using the default desktop environment that comes automatically installed on Raspberry Pi OS, which is PIXEL (based on LXDE).
- Click on the Raspberry Pi icon in your system’s taskbar to open the a menu full of settings, and then head to Preferences > Screen Configuration.
Opening the Screen Configuration settings on Raspberry Pi - Right click on the monitor that you want to change the resolution for. Most likely you will only have one display to choose from. Go to resolution and then select the resolution that you want to use with this screen.
Changing the resolution on Raspberry Pi
Set headless resolution on Raspberry Pi
The other resolution setting that you may be interested in configuring is that for your headless connections, i.e., VNC. This will determine the default resolution that users have when they use VNC to remotely log in to the Raspberry Pi.
Headless resolution can be configured via the GUI’s menus, but we will assume that you may not have direct access to the GUI. Whether you do or not, we can configure the headless resolution via command line by following the steps below:
- Open a command line terminal and type the following command to open the Raspberry Pi configuration tool:
$ sudo raspi-config
- Open up Display Options from the configuration tool.
Opening display options - Then, highlight the option for VNC resolution and press
Enter.
Use the option to set VNC resolution - Finally, we can set the VNC resolution to any of the choices on this menu.
Select your desired resolution for VNC and exit the tool
Closing Thoughts
In this tutorial, we saw how to set the resolution on a Raspberry Pi. Normally, the Raspberry Pi should detect the optimal resolution and apply the settings automatically, but this does not always work in practice. We can adjust the resolution easily enough from the GUI menus as seen here, and can also configure the VNC resolution via command line or GUI, depending on what we currently have access to.
