Hands on: Resolving Ubuntu screen setup

If you’ve been following the Linux/Unix Hands on columns for the past few months and have decided to give things a try, you’ll now hopefully have a fairly good installation of Breezy Badger, the version of Ubuntu Linux released in October 2005.

We’ve looked beyond the initial installation to a lot more, such as setting up video and DVD playback and using Ubuntu’s user-management system to add administrator users.

The next release, Dapper Drake, should be available for download now. Here, we’ll look at some of the common problems associated with Ubuntu Linux; these also apply to Dapper.

One issue is the screen resolution. Many people have emailed with problems regarding their screen setup.

When you first install Breezy, the installation program attempts to read the monitor settings and automatically configure your graphics card and screen.

Usually this works well: a monitor is capable of telling the system which resolutions it can display and, for LCD monitors, which resolution is the most appropriate.

However, sometimes there are problems with this detection. In these cases, Ubuntu throws up a screen asking you to select which resolutions you want to use.

This is where you should make sure you select the highest resolution you’ll want to use. If you accept the defaults and continue with the installation, these resolutions will be the only ones available to you once the installation is complete.

Limitations

This brings us to what may be Ubuntu’s biggest drawback: it lacks many of the administrative utilities other distributions have.

Suse Linux has Yast, for example, which helps you configure all sorts of tasks, from setting up hardware to controlling remote logins.

It’s easy to forget that Ubuntu is only around a year old and, as such, is still developing rapidly.

As things stand, there are no graphical utilities for reconfiguring the graphics hardware, or other immed iately obvious ways to do it.

The configuration for both the graphics card and the monitor is stored in the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf. This is a plain text file and is suitable for editing.

One way to change the screen resolutions is to load up this file and change them directly. If you want to take a look, run the following command in a terminal:

$ sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

$ sudo nvidia-glx-config enable

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