How to recover from virtual screen miles bigger than the real screen?

[Marius Gedminas]

On Wed, Feb 04, 2009 at 09:05:12PM +0000, Chris G wrote:
> I just changed the resolution to 1600x1200 using xubuntu Settings
> Manager for another user login on my desktop machine and I've ended up
> with (I think) a huge virtual screen on which I can't see or do
> anything. It's not that the display can't cope, it's working happily,
> but there's nothing except background visible on screen.

Can you see the mouse cursor moving?

Running 'xrandr --auto' may or may not help.  You can probably use
Alt+F2 to get a run dialog type it in blindly.  I'm not familiar with
Xfce, but I think it has the same shortcut for the run dialog.

> How do I sort this out, get control back again.  All I can do at the
> moment is switch to another virtual login.  If I log in again as this
> user I just get the blank background again.
> 
> I already have the resolution set to 1600x1200 for my normal user
> login and there it works perfectly.

Just a wild guess, but perhaps one of the two user accounts has
compositing enabled, while the other one has it disabled?  It could be
that the screen is too large for the 3D engine to cope with, so the
screen doesn't get redrawn.

> Also, how do I get this user swithched to 1600x1200 properly?  All I
> want is for it to work the same as for the other user that works fine
> at 1600x1200.

Marius Gedminas
-- 
The reason computer chips are so small is that computers don't eat much.
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