[syhprum (OP)]

Wishing to join the ranks of the proper Geeks I setup with difficulty Ubuntu 9.10 on my AMD64 computer as a fourth system.
When I got it running I was disappointed to find only 600x800 or 480x640 screen resolution available which is not really good enough for my 22" monitor.

[LeeE]

I would guess that your graphics cards hasn't been correctly identified, but even then 600 or 480 resolutions seem very low: 640x480 or 800x600 defaults are more typical vesa display modes.

I just tried Googling "ubuntu 9.10 screen resolution" and got quite a few hits so try having a look at some of those links to see if they get you anywhere.

[RD]

Never used Linux, (I'm only half-geek  [] ), but when doing a bare-metal reinstallation of Windows Vista the resolution is initially coarse until I install the video driver for my (Dell) laptop, (downloaded from Dell website), then it's high-resolution loveliness.

[syhprum (OP)]

RD

As a half geek I guess you have little conception of the complexities of LINUX, would that it was so easy!!

[LeeE]

Have you tried booting one of the various 'live-CD' Linuxes (Linii?) to see if they give you a decent screen res?  I haven't tried Ubuntu 9.10 but I keep an old Ubuntu 8 (LTS) CD handy for problem solving on Windows PCs and that gives me good screen resolutions on everything I've tried it on.

[syhprum (OP)]

The internet seems full of people on blogs and forums protesting that they cannot get NVIDIA to work on Ubuntu, I have a stable working of version 9.04 but although I can get as far as running a test of the NVIDIA 7050 card It says no go.
I feel I may have achieved 10% of Geek status so far!

[RD]

A quick google found this, (it's all geek Greek to me though) ....

The restricted drivers manager has made things a mess for a lot of people with newer and older nVidia cards.The restricted modules are getting load priority over the nvidia-installed module.

If you want to fix this follow this procedure

sudo apt-get install build-essential

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-dev

sudo vi /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules*

Change the DISABLED_MODULES=”" to DISABLED_MODULES=”nv”

Save the file and exit.Now you need to reboot your machine.

After reboot, download the proper driver package from the nVidia website and save it somewhere where you can easily access it.

Now you need to press Ctrl-Alt-F2 to open up a console and login

Use the following command to shutdown Xorg

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

Now run the following command from the location where you saved the nV file.

sudo sh NV*

Run through the installer and tell it to update your xorg.conf for you.

Reboot once again (just type reboot at the console) and you should have full nVidia acceleration.

#
Avo says:
February 23, 2009 at 4:38 pm

Hi,
I followed the instructions from the beginning of this thread. Unfortunately I didn’t get expected result. After rebooting I got error message: Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module! Now I cannot use NVIDIA driver. I’m using Ubuntu 8.10 on AMD64.
Can somebody help, what goes wrong and how to fix it?

#
Avo says:
February 24, 2009 at 8:14 am

Thanks to NVIDIA support I resolved previous problem: Failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module!
I removed 2 packages: linux-restricted-modules and linux-restricted-modules-common. After that error disappears and system booted up normally.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-fix-nvidia-acceleration-in-feisty-nvidia-8800-and-legacy-users.html

[syhprum (OP)]

Although this might on some video cards I do not think there is any hope of it working on my Ge-Force 7050 mother board with integral 630n video.
I am abandoning efforts until I purchase a new video card (not a very high priority at the moment).

[syhprum (OP)]

After much diligent hunting I have found a suitable NVIDIA driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-185.18.31.pkg2.run)that enables me to run at normal screen resolution.
It tells me that I am running 1024/768 at 85Hz but I don't think my monitor supports such a frame rate but the shape and size of pictures seems to be OK.
Setting things up in Linux seems to be rather a black art but the object of the exercise was to increase my Geek rating which seems to have been accomplished

[syhprum (OP)]

I suffered a problem with my monitor (the blue channel disappears) while proding about with the oscilloscope I seem to have damaged the built in 630 video card so I had no alternative but to purchase a new one.
I bought a NVIDIA 8400 from Maplins for £39.99 and formatted the partition and reloaded Ubuntu 8.10, now I have no problem with drivers I have a variety of screen resolutions available.
I should have done this in the first place!!!

[LeeE]

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