Microsoft wants you to "Get the Facts Straight"

[Michael Haney]

A serious issue has cropped up in Ubuntu in the last two versions.
That problem is the inability to easily select what kind of Monitor
you are using.
Oh, you can change the resolution just fine, but if X.org doesn't
detect the right settings for your monitor it can lock you into a
default setting.  The result is you're stuck with 640x480 and 800x600
as your only options.  The minute you install a driver for your 3D
graphics card (Nvidia, Intel, ATI, etc) suddenly you're locked at
640x480.  It used to be that you could choose your monitors settings
from the display dialogue in Preferences, but that changed about
releases back.  I've tried to make people in the Ubuntu Support group
understand that this is a problem, that monitors don't always report
their settings to X.org properly, and that a non-technical newbie who
was giving Ubuntu a try for the first would be put off by a problem
like this which is insanely simple to fix in Windows but is difficult
and frustrating to fix in Linux.  It shouldn't be that way.  Ubuntu
was meant to be the Linux that everyday not techie people can use
without hassles, and this qualifies as a major hassle if the problem
affects you.  I've run into a lot of people who slammed into this
problem.

I'm a techie, so I found a temporary work-around, but I know for a
fact that the average Jane/Joe computer user out there would never in
a million years comprehend or even be willing to do what I did to fix
the problem.  I've worked in tech support for 10+ years, so I know how
tech savy the average American is ... and no knowing how to an tap
icon on the screen of iPhone or sent a Tweet from your Blackberry
doesn't make you tech savy.

How I fixed my problem is I edited by xorg.conf file, copy and pasted
my monitor settings from an older version of Ubuntu that still had the
feature to change the monitor in Preferences, and restart X.org.  The
problem here is .... I shouldn't have had to do that, all I should
have had to do was goto the Display dialogue under System ==>
Preferences.  Why is something as simple as this so hard to
comprehend?

-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch at gmail.com
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