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

[Chris G]

On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 03:21:36AM +0200, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> 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?
> 
Yes.

> 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.
> 
Yes, it does, not something I use ever but for this situation it is
very useful, thank you.

I eventually used Alt+F4 to close the session down.


> > 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.
> 
A system reboot (as opposed to just logging the users out) seems to
have sorted things out.  It's not as if the other user account will be
used often (if ever) so it's not a big issue.

-- 
Chris Green