Introducing myself to the list, and a first question

[Les Wright]

Greetings Canadian Ubuntu users!

I recently got a new iMac with lots of memory and have effortlessly 
installed Feisty in a virtual machine under VMware Fusion. It looks and 
runs beautifully there, and since I splurged on the extra 2GB of memory 
(I got a good price through the York U computer store), I can run Ubuntu 
alongside XP and the native Mac OS easily. It only starts breathing hard 
if if doing any disk intensive work that keeps the hard drive busy. I am 
a very happy guy. I haven't been so happy with a computer since first 
fooling around with the TRS-80 as a teen.

My installation of Ubuntu to my old PC didn't go as smoothly. It works 
well enough, and I am pleased my Netgear wireless card was recognized 
out of the box and I could download needed updates and desired packages. 
But the monitor is another story.

I have 19" Samsung Syncmaster 192N--an older monitor, but it works fine 
and should achieve a maximum resolution of 1280x1024 but I haven't been 
able to get above 1024x768 with the built in nv driver. The card is one 
in NVidia GeForce4 MX series, don't know which one. I have gotten the 
legacy driver that supports this card from the NVidia site. My first 
install attempt led to me losing video and the monitor displaying a 
little box saying "video mode not supported". The first couple of times 
I did a complete reinstall of Ubuntu until I realized that Ctrl-Alt-F1 
or Ctrl-Alt-F2 led me to the shell. The first couple of times I let the 
nividia installer set up my xorg.conf file for me, but after a couple of 
reinstalls I thought the wiser of that and Chose to try to make 
adjustments manually. So I listed "nvidia" as the driver and removed 
"nv" and couple of other options as specified in the Readme. The bottom 
line is that if "nvidia" is in that line in lieu of "nv", I lose video 
and have to go into the shell sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf to fix what I 
have changed to get video back again. I have tried added "1280x1084" to 
the resolution options list, but it doesn't show up in the drop down 
menu in the Screen Resolution options.

The good thing is that my card reader on the old PC is recognized, so I 
can easily back up my home directory and do a completely fresh 
reisnstall of Ubuntu if that is what it takes. It is not crucial that I 
get this old box to work, since my Mac version works so well, but it is 
the pricinple of the thing. If there is a way to get the best resolution 
out of this Samsung monitor and NVidia card, I would like to know how. I 
believe others have made this work.

Many thanks
Les
Toronto