Ubuntu and screen resolution and MIT

[Martin Owens]

Hmm,

In Ubuntu the xorg.conf file is slowly being deprecated in favour of
xrandr and proper hardware detection. The problem is that in order to
detect the capabilities of a monitor or screen, your computer needs:

1) Chipset drivers able to invoke i2c and ddr requests
2) A screen or monitor with such a chipset (most new ones do)
3) And for the monitor to not lie (which they do)
4) A chipset that doesn't screw up the results (some do)

So it's all a bag of crap because none of the chipset companies could
get their act together and the screen manufacturers don't pay enough
attention to data quality control.

The reason nvidia is such a pain in the neck is that nvidia doesn't
support randr, or kms, or any useful xorg service except the old stuff
like dri and i2c. Of course if you just using the nv driver, that has no
scanning support so it won't ever be able to see the screen settings.

Martin

On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 09:38 -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Apparently the new overhead projectors at MIT have problems with Linux,
> but that is for a future discussion.
> Last night, to get my display to work on the overhead, I changed the
> resolution several times, and I am unable to restore my previous
> resolution through the Display Preferences GUI. My previous resolution
> was 1400x1050 60Hz. The Display Preferences wizard only gives me
> 1280x768. Fortunately my previous xorg.conf was saved, so I was able to
> recover my previous settings, so my question is more rhetorical. After
> copying my previous xorg.conf.2009.... file to xorg.conf, and restarting
> the GUI the Display Preferences wizard now shows 1400x1050(4:3) 60Hz and
> my screen resolution is back to normal.
> 
> While I generally know what I am doing under the covers, how would a
> normal user be able to recover from a situation like last night where I
> was trying to see if the overhead would work with my system.  In this
> case my laptop is running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.
> 
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