Ubuntu and screen resolution and MIT

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

On 10/22/2009 09:38 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Apparently the new overhead projectors at MIT have problems with Linux,
> but that is for a future discussion.
> Last night, to get my display to work on the overhead, I changed the
> resolution several times, and I am unable to restore my previous
> resolution through the Display Preferences GUI. My previous resolution
> was 1400x1050 60Hz. The Display Preferences wizard only gives me
> 1280x768. Fortunately my previous xorg.conf was saved, so I was able to
> recover my previous settings, so my question is more rhetorical. After
> copying my previous xorg.conf.2009.... file to xorg.conf, and restarting
> the GUI the Display Preferences wizard now shows 1400x1050(4:3) 60Hz and
> my screen resolution is back to normal.
> 
> While I generally know what I am doing under the covers, how would a
> normal user be able to recover from a situation like last night where I
> was trying to see if the overhead would work with my system.  In this
> case my laptop is running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

I've actually found that the solution to most of my xorg problems nowadays is
to just blow away the xorg.conf file completely, and let it autoconfigure (it
gets slightly more complicated with the proprietary nvidia driver).

I've had problems forever with LCD screens not reporting their capabilities to
X properly, and so X stays conservative.

The correct steps for hooking up to external displays is, in my experience,
highly dependent on your video chipset.  At work I have one set of dell
laptops that will plug-n-play with an external monitor (ie boot up, then plug
in the monitor, restart X, and bam, it works), but my personal laptop, which
is also dell but has an Nvidia Quadro card, I have to go in to xorg.conf and
set up TwinView for it to work properly (using the proprietary drivers for the
latter, obviously).

Matt