As you may have heard on a November Fresh Ubuntu podcast, I was disappointed at Gutsy’s inability to reliably detect my widescreen 19″ flat panel display. It failed to give me the option to set the display to its native resolution of 1440×900 pixels. However, booting from the live CD correctly detected and set the resolution!
The fix?
- Back up /etc/X11
cd; tar cvfx X11.tgz /etc/X11 - Boot from the live CD, and mount the Ubuntu partition (/dev/sda1 on my computer) into /media/sda1.
sudo su; mkdir /media/sda1; mount /dev/sda1 /media/sda1 - Set the screen to its proper resolution, if it’s not there already.
Click System | Preferences | Screen Resolution | Choose the desired resolution | Click Apply. - Copy the working X11 config over to the inactive copy on the hard drive
cp -fuvr /etc/X11/* /media/sda1/etc/X11/
Reboot from the hard drive and presto! We have 1440×900.
Now… if only I can get Windows to do the same thing. But that’s a separate blog post.