Pursuant to a problem I started having yesterday, it looks like it wasn’t a temporary problem, but a permanent intermittent one. It seems that sometimes my monitor isn’t detected and so the GPU goes into an abominable 640x480 resolution. I was in a big hurry earlier today, and after 3 or 4 cuss-accompanied restarts, it finally started working. I’ve had this monitor on Win98, WinXP and Ubuntu 8.10 and this has never happened before.
Now that I’m at 1600x1200, is there anything I can do to prevent this problem? Right now, nvidia-settings calls it a Dell ULTRASCANP990, but when this problem comes up, it can’t identify it. Is there a way to just force the resolution?
Use the nvidia-settings utility (as root) to set the desired resolution, and save the configuration to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-monitor.conf
Ok, I’m in the utility now, but I don’t see where to do that. On “X Server Display Configuration” I can “Save to X Configuration File” but that produces and xorg.conf, not a conf.d rule. In “nvdia-settings Configuration” I can “Save Current Configuration” but I think that is the configuratino of this utlity. Also, there’s no option for me to set the resolution. Are you sure this is the right utlity?
Ok, I’m in the utility now, but I don’t see where to do that. On “X Server Display Configuration” I can “Save to X Configuration File” but that produces and xorg.conf, not a conf.d rule.
Choose ‘Save to X Configuration File’ to save a working xorg.conf. The other location /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ contains a number of configuration files. (Each one represents a different section of the legacy corg.conf file. They are not rules).
If you can’t set it the desired resolution there, save the configuration, and edit manually. Read this thread. That should give you the idea.