screen resolution ubuntu 8.04-9.04 and 9.10 alpha 1-6 and beta

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 10:27 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/10/4 Henning Nymark Melgaard <nymark1 at gmail.com>:
>
>> Or is this simply a matter of priority? Is my graphics card to old for
>> Ubuntu to be bothered with it?
>> Is this some kind of "Ubuntu policy", that older hardware is not going to be
>> supported. If it is that would be nice to know.
>> For how many years will Ubuntu support your hardware? How often will you
>> have to go and buy a new pc, to keep using Ubuntu?
>
>
> Mostly it's older drivers in X11. Xorg tries to autoconfigure all
> cards. This *mostly* works, but when it doesn't it just doesn't. And
> you have to resort to creating an xorg.conf file.
>
> These things are reportable bugs in Ubuntu, but basically they won't
> be fixed unless and until someone fixes the drivers upstream.
>
> Yes, it's extremely annoying ... but it's far less annoying than the
> old days. Ask old Linux hands about modelines. Some theorise the
> Xfree86/Xorg split happened when David Dawes finally lost it trying to
> fix a broken modeline.

Actually, no, on this one, I cannot agree.

Ubuntu's hardware config tools are badly lacking and always have been.
It takes the approach that Linux will detect stuff and it will just
work and sometimes offers a little bit of adjustment.

This is fine when it works but it doesn't always work.

Back in "the old days" of 1990s Linux, early-ish Redhat was quite good
and Caldera and SuSE led the way in this. They had device manager type
things, you could look up hardware entries, manually set IRQs and DMAs
and things, or manually pick a driver and tell the system "I don't
care if you can't see it, THIS is your Ethernet card, use it". This
kind of thing was /invaluable/ when I was still using ISA devices and
so on. (My first 2 dedicated Linux boxes were 486s when that was not
particularly old or slow.)

On the same note, both SuSE and Xandros offered screen-config tools
where you could force the system to use the resolution you chose,
never mind what it thought it ought to be. Ubuntu has a mind of its
own on this - it will pick the right res and if it can't it offers a
handful of safe bets (800*600, 1024*768) and if those are not right,
tough, sod-off and do it yourself matey.

Writing a custom config file by hand is /not/ an acceptable
alternative, not in 2009.

It is one of the most significant weak spots of the whole distro
experience and as such although a small detail it is a major failing.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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