Screen resolution loop [help!]

[Harold Hartley]

David Armour wrote:
> On my up-to-date Hardy machine (workhorse3), the LCD displays 1280 x 1024.
> Workhorse5, however, with the very same LCD(!) sets up at 640 x 480, and resists
> all efforts (mine, at least) to painlessly switch to higher resolutions. (See
> below.) A 640 x 480 resolution, admittedly, makes the numbers big & easy to
> read, but also unfortunately all-too-often sacrifices key bits (e.g.
> close/resize, scroll bars) to the nether-world off-screen.  
> 
> Hoping to circumvent the hundreds of usual post-release up-dates, and perhaps
> gain the benefits of a new(-er), improved! Ubuntu, I kludgely downloaded
> 'Intrepid-Alpha6' and found 304 (!) up-dates waiting in the wings ... 
> 
> Worse, once the system was supposedly 'up-to-date', and I had picked the
> 'recommended' Nvidia driver from the System>Hardware Drivers> drop-down, and
> pressed Crtl-Alt-Backspace "... to 'restart' X server", I got:
>       [screen goes black, with blinking cursor in top left corner]
> 	[requires cold re-boot]
>        restarting Ubuntu displays the loading 'thermometer', then a CLI screen
> with a log-in prompt too brief to complete, before returning to:		[screen goes
> black / requires cold re-boot] 
> 
> ...which is where I had come in with the Hardy install.
> 
> Workhorse5 also works fine at 1280x1024 with puppy-linux, but for now, I'm
> mostly interested in getting out of this Ubuntu log-in loop. Any ideas?
> 
> 
I have the same problem. I had a resolution of 1440 x 900 and now its 
640 x 480 and this is a widescreen HD display and I thought it was a 
problem with my new monitor.
Now that I read the threads, I now know it is from my update for my 
ubuntu 8.04....