Setting the screen resolution

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2008 23:15:38 -0500
"Andrew S." <vir.admin at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Vince,
> 
> Thank you for your email. I found the "xorg.conf" file but I am not
> sure how to edit it, or what to edit (I am new to the world of Linux).
> Can you tell me what changes I need to make and how to make them to
> resolve my problem?


Hi Andrew,

First of all, that file being a system file, you have to have
administrative rights to be allowed to modifiy/write to it:

Press Alt+F2 to display the "run" dialog box, then enter:

gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

press enter, then you will asked for your password (the same password
that you used to log in).

Now you should have the file loaded into "Gedit", the text editor of
Gnome/Ubuntu. 

THe file is very well structured: you have various "sections", each of
them describes a peripheral that make part of the user interface, for
example the keyboard, the mouse, the video card, the monitor.

What you need to do is specify a couple characteristics (the refresh
rates) of your monitor. SO in the file, locate this section:


Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection


make add acouple lines in that section, so that it looks like that:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier "Configured Monitor"
    HorizSync      31-69
    VertRefresh    55-120
EndSection


Now, the numerical values I indicated here (31-69, and 55-120) are
those that correspond to MY monitor, don't use these values ! They
differ from monitor to monitor !
So you must use the values that correspond to YOUR particular monitor.
So, dig out the user/technical manual of your monitor, and search for
that information. They should be easy to find, as they are very
basic/important charateristics of any monitor.
If you give us the exact model of your monitor (and is it an LCD or
CRT to start with?), we could search for the user manual on the
internet, and find out the values for you. 


--
Vince