Changing resolution

[Neil Woolford]

On Mon, 2005-08-01 at 00:52 +0000, Ian Kabeary wrote:
> Hi there.
> A laptop of my friend's has Ubuntu on it, which has
> decided to keep him at 640x480. This is of course,
> painful. Previously, he had Windows on it, which was
> able to get 800x600. The GNOME 'applet(?)' to change
> resolutions does not provide any other choices besides
> 640x480. Having Gentoo on one of my computers, I
> know that there is an X.org configuration file I can edit.
> Is this what I would do in this situation, or does Ubuntu
> not have this?
> Thanks!!
> Ian

It looks like autodetection of the video system has failed;  this is
most common on laptops of course, as the hardware is sometimes a bit
'specialised'...

You are right that there is an X.org configuration file.  Details of its
location and many of the likely problems are given in
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/FixVideoResolutionHowto

I have also found that manually editing the
desktop>gnome>screen>default># (# is a number) under the Configuration
Editor (Applications > System Tools > Configuration Editor) can set the
maximum resolution that Gnome offers out of the ones available in the
X.org configuration file.

Neil