Ubuntu 5.04 on HP nx9110

[James Pifer]

Hi. I'm fairly new to Ubuntu although I've played with it a little
lately. In the past I've mainly used Redhat/Fedora. I was running FC3 on
my HP nx9110 laptop and a recent 'apt-get upgrade' blew up my xorg
config and my display settings were trashed. I couldn't get it to work
the same even using my backed up xorg.conf.  With that, and some other
problems, I decided to try Ubuntu. 

It installed great and I'm working through the "issues". My biggest
issue is the display, especially the external display. The laptop runs
at 1280x800 on the internal display using an ATI Radeon Mobility 9100 U3
(R200 IGP) and looks great. If I plug in the external display and reboot
it stays at the same resolution. I don't have an option for 1280x1024.
It's like it doesn't see the external adapter, even though the video is
coming through it. 

In FC3 I was used to going to System Settings/Display and was able to
modify the settings, both for the internal and the external display. I
can't find anything like that on Ubuntu. 

In searching the archives and google it looks like people have been
manually editing xorg.conf to get external displays working. Is there
any other way? How come ubuntu doesn't seem to see the external display
adapter similar to how Fedora Core does?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,
James