Cannot get better resolution than 640x480

[pwabrahams]

I've just installed Kubuntu 10.04 on another machine, and I can't get screen resolution higher than 640x480. I've looked in the nvidia-xconfig, and the only choices there are 640x480, 320x240, and Auto. To make matters worse, the low resolution cripples konsole, among other programs. The konsole output runs off the bottom of the screen -- and the settings screen that I would otherwise use to reduce (temporarily) the number of lines itself runs off the bottom of the screen!!

I know the hardware (Acer Aspire 3100 laptop) is just fine, since I'm running OpenSuSE in another partition at high resolution.

When I first started the system after installing it, the resolution I got was 1024x764 -- not very good, but not absolutely unusable either. (1280x1024 seems best for my environment.) After doing apt-get install nvidia-current, it went down to 640x480.

I've searched this forum and Google and find lots of stuff that's semi-relevant, but no answers.

[dibl]

Re: Cannot get better resolution than 640x480

Says here that the Acer Aspire 3100 has an ATI Radeon 1100 GPU: http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/acer....html?tag=rnav

If that is true, you can forget about Nvidia drivers. Just

sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia-current

to get rid of it.

I'm not very up to speed about ATI video issues -- I see a lot of posts about fiddling with xorg.conf. I would think you need the driver "xserver-xorg-video-radeon".

[pwabrahams]

nvidia or ati?

That's odd -- hwinfo says that it's an nvidia but the link you cite says it's an ati.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Cannot get better resolution than 640x480

The problem here is Acer Aspire 3100 is a generic model - you need the full model to get the correct specs, like Acer Aspire 3100-1536 or whatever. It like saying Dell Opteron with the model number...

Anyway - I doubt hwinfo is lying so why don't you post the exact model of your nvidia chip, do some web searching on it and xorg, review your log file for messages - /var/log/Xorg.0.log, look and see if you're using an xorg.conf file - /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and post it's contents if you are.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Cannot get better resolution than 640x480

The 3100 manual states:

ATI Radeon® Xpress 1100 or Xpress1200 chipset

[zlow]

Re: nvidia or ati?

That's odd -- hwinfo says that it's an nvidia but the link you cite says it's an ati.

No one is asking you the right questions and they are all making silly assumptions (except you oshunluvr).

First, lets find out what is in your particular model. What is the output of each of these commands, wrap the output of each of them in a code tag.

sudo su -
dmidecode
lspci -v
dmesg

[pwabrahams]

Solved, partially

Recent system updates, together with removing the nvidia stuff, solved the problem completely on my Acer laptop. But on another machine, the problem has taken a different form. When the system starts up, the resolution is 1024x768. I can change it to 1280x1024, but the change is lost after a system restart. I've reported this as a bug.

[oshunluvr]

Re: Cannot get better resolution than 640x480

There's many posts on this forum about various ways to make the resolution stick. Do a little research and I'm sure you can find one that fits your situation. Glad you got partially fixed at least.

My personally experience: Started with linux 10 years ago and video was a huge problem. Now I think most people have a pretty good initial experience so it's gotten way better. Sound card and modems were other areas where, 10 years ago - 90% of people had to really work to get them running right. Now I think it's 90% that work out of the box.