Ubuntu

I've been using UNIX since 1990. A few years later, I joined the Red Hat Linux world. Over time, I've played with other Linux distributions: SuSE, Mandrake, etc., but Red Hat, which later morphed into Fedora, was my distro of choice.

A few days ago, in the process of upgrading my existing Fedora set, I ran into some problems, and decided to give Ubuntu a try. Am I glad I did. Everything is nicer about Ubuntu. The Wireless Network Manager is a particularly useful addition. All went well, and I had myself a spanking new Linux OS all set up -- except for the display. For some reason, even though my monitor is capable of up to 1280x1024, I was stuck with the painfully low resolution of 800x600.

After much poking around on the Net looking for answers, and trying nVidia's own driver for Linux (which didn't work at all as the driver causes the whole system to freeze), I noticed some entries in /var/log/Xorg.0.log:

(II) NV(0): VG800-2: Using default hsync range of 31.50-37.90 kHz
(II) NV(0): VG800-2: Using default vrefresh range of 50.00-70.00 Hz
(II) NV(0): Clock range: 12.00 to 350.00 MHz
[...]
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "640x350" (vrefresh out of range)
[...]
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (bad mode
clock/interlace/doublescan)
[...]
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (hsync out of range)
[...]
(**) NV(0): *Default mode "800x600": 40.0 MHz, 37.9 kHz, 60.3 Hz

I know my monitor supports an hsync range of 30-82 kHz, and a vrefresh range of 50-75 Hz. It turns out that sometimes, the built-in driver for the video card has trouble obtaining these hardware values. One solution is to feed the values to the driver by adding in Xorg.conf these lines:

Option "HorizSync" "30-82"
Option "VertRefresh" "50-75"

A Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X, but still, I got the 800x600 low resolution. This time, Xorg.0.log contained:

(WW) NV(0): Option "HorizSync" is not used
(WW) NV(0): Option "VertRefresh" is not used

Why not?! More searching on the web pointed out that in xorg.conf, I must use:

HorizSync 30-82
VertRefresh 50-75

I.e. without "Option" and the quotes. Now I did a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X, and voila! high resolution!!