The xorg.conf file used to look like the current version plus the append of the “Monitor” section of “get-edid | parse-edid”. You can put sections such as “Monitor” in your xorg.conf and that should be used (EDID silently does the equivalent of putting “Monitor” in xorg.conf). If you know what data should fit there, then you don’t actually need EDID anymore. Here is an example “get-edid | parse-edid” output excerpt from an older monitor on a JTK1 which could be used for illustration:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "VX2235wm"
ModelName "VX2235wm"
VendorName "VSC"
# Monitor Manufactured week 28 of 2007
# EDID version 1.3
# Digital Display
DisplaySize 470 300
Gamma 2.20
Option "DPMS" "true"
Horizsync 30-82
VertRefresh 50-75
# Maximum pixel clock is 150MHz
#Not giving standard mode: 1680x1050, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1600x1200, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1440x900, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1400x1050, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1280x1024, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1280x960, 60Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 1152x864, 75Hz
#Not giving standard mode: 640x400, 70Hz
Modeline "Mode 0" 146.25 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync
EndSection
Notice that comments start with “#”, and that some of the lines are not actually mandatory…here’s a subset of lines which I believe would be a minimum to put in xorg.conf for the “Monitor” section:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "VX2235wm"
Option "DPMS" "true"
Horizsync 30-82
VertRefresh 50-75
Modeline "Mode 0" 146.25 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync
EndSection
Of those, you can probably find vertical and horizontal ranges and edit to match your monitor. Identifier is not important, but probably choose something like “Adafruit”. The key to getting the display to be as you want is the “Modeline”. There are programs out there to help compute a modeline based on other information, as well as documentation…it’s complicated and I don’t know the answer offhand. You’ll have to research that and the information the calculations want.
The xrandr command can be used to test prior to edit if you want. See “man xrandr”. Basically earlier EDID commands are used to directly query and display information in general for the display…making changes from this means editing xorg.conf and restarting X11. xrandr is tied to currently running display and can edit display parameters without restarting X11…but changes would go away upon reboot.
Note about xorg.conf: The file is arranged in “Section ” blocks. One block can refer to another block. The “Monitor” section can have as many copies as you want for different monitors, e.g., having 2 or 3 monitors on a large desktop graphics card. The “Device” is about the graphics card. I don’t remember enough of this anymore, but there should be another section (I think “Screen”) which ties together what you will see on a given monitor by naming the identifier of a “Monitor” section and a “Device” section. It gets complicated, there are good reasons for doing away with manual configuration.
Big note: If you edited the EDID data EEPROM you can no longer use that information to get the format added to valid EDID parsing. The email address that was in the original message is VERY useful, as the data from a slightly broken format could be added to the next update from the maintainer. Be very careful about choosing between editing an EEPROM and instead sending the data to the email address.