I don’t know if this is a general problem or it affects only some particular video cards but I know that my old FX5500 didn’t had a chance.
After the installation process of Ubuntu itself (all went ok) when the login box appeard for the first time I noticed that the resolution was 640×480. That was very weird because all the distros I’ve ever tried on this PC were setting up by default a 1204×768 resolution.
Normally, the first thing I went to do was to change the resolution as it was very annoying. I was very surprised to see that only 640×480 mode was available. I said to myself that after I will install the nVIDIA driver everything would be ok. I installed the driver through the native hardware driver window (something like Device Manager from Windows). Rebooted the system and all was the same. Checked the available resolutions nothing was there to choose from. I was clearly seeing that the nVIDIA driver was succesfully installed because even Compiz was using it at full throthle but only on 640×480.
I tried to solve things with EnvyNG, by editing xorg.conf, installing the nVIDIA drivers the hard way, typing in a lot of commands that were related to video settings but nothing seemed to work. I did a little bit of research but nothing relevant came up. People had the same problems but their solutions were not working for me.
I was on the point of installing Ubuntu 7.10 again but the following command saved me:
gksudo displayconfig-gtk
All you have to do is to type that command in a terminal (root access is required) and from there just choose your display model and the corresponding resolution and frequency. The settings will be applied after you log in again.
This is a very easy and effective way of correcting this problem.
Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) resolution workaround
I don’t know if this is a general problem or it affects only some particular video cards but I know that my old FX5500 didn’t had a chance.
After the installation process of Ubuntu itself (all went ok) when the login box appeard for the first time I noticed that the resolution was 640×480. That was very weird because all the distros I’ve ever tried on this PC were setting up by default a 1204×768 resolution.
Normally, the first thing I went to do was to change the resolution as it was very annoying. I was very surprised to see that only 640×480 mode was available. I said to myself that after I will install the nVIDIA driver everything would be ok. I installed the driver through the native hardware driver window (something like Device Manager from Windows). Rebooted the system and all was the same. Checked the available resolutions nothing was there to choose from. I was clearly seeing that the nVIDIA driver was succesfully installed because even Compiz was using it at full throthle but only on 640×480.
I tried to solve things with EnvyNG, by editing xorg.conf, installing the nVIDIA drivers the hard way, typing in a lot of commands that were related to video settings but nothing seemed to work. I did a little bit of research but nothing relevant came up. People had the same problems but their solutions were not working for me.
I was on the point of installing Ubuntu 7.10 again but the following command saved me:
All you have to do is to type that command in a terminal (root access is required) and from there just choose your display model and the corresponding resolution and frequency. The settings will be applied after you log in again.
This is a very easy and effective way of correcting this problem.