[wellylug] Dealing with low resolution in Ubuntu

Cliff Pratt enkidu at cliffp.com
Tue Jun 24 09:26:36 NZST 2008


Rob Collins wrote:
> John Durham wrote:
>> Thanks for all the help getting Ubuntu updates yesterday. By late 
>> evening it was installed and looking pretty good. There was only one 
>> small problem.
>>
>> Screen resolution was low, which meant playing the games on it showed 
>> only part of the game board. The rest was below the bottom of screen. I 
>> tried swapping out the old VGA card for some others (older PCI types 
>> from stock). One it didn't like and wanted to re-install. The other was 
>> accepted, but with no improvement.
>>
>> Is it going to be necessary to re-install for this, or will it accept a 
>> card with more memory? There is a basic AGP slot on the motherboard.
>>   
> I suspect ubuntu has just chosen the generic versa graphics setup.
> Do you know what graphics card you've got?  If not at terminal do:
> wget http://blogage.de/files/4359/download -O compiz-check
> then:
> chmod +x compiz-check
> then:
> ./compiz-check
> 
> This will return (amongst others) what graphics chip you are running.  
> You will then know what graphics software modules to install or use.  If 
> you need a hand with this email again.
> 
Ubuntu can sometimes be tricky to configure. It uses a failsafe 
mechanism that switches to a failsafe xorg.conf if it doesn't like your 
one. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to make it use the 'real' one 
once it's decided it is bad. Copying xorg.conf to xorg.conf.failsafe is 
one way but you risk trying to use a screwed xorg.conf with that approach!

Cheers,

Cliff



More information about the wellylug mailing list