Losing video settings - NVidia

[fguy64]

Greetings - I'm using Debian Lenny & gnome desktop. I have an older 32 MB NVidia video card that shipped with my Dell PIII.

Anyways, this has happened to me a few times. I start out with video settings set at some resolution that looks like 1280x1024 on my 17" monitor. This setting comes automatically with the install and I just leave it there. But Gnome doesn't last longer than a day or two before my resolution reverts to 800x600. Furthermore, when I go into my Screen Resolution Preferences, I have only 800x600 and 640x480 as options, and my refresh choices are 56 & 60 Hz.

Anyways, I haven't tried driver re-install yet, at this point I'm just wondering if this is a known issue. This machine is used primarily as a dev server, and dicking with the video drivers never seems to be a high priority, but I suppose I should try and solve it.

[Rubberman]

I think that the version of the xorg server you are running with Lenny automatically detects what the card/monitor are capable of. I think your card is starting to fail. Have you considered getting a new video card? You can get a very nice nVidia card these days for under $100 USD that will provide much higher resolutions than 1280x1024 as well as support for multiple monitors.

[fguy64]

Thanks. I suppose I could get a new card. I certainly don't need anything fancy, I'm not a serious gamer or graphics guy. It's not even my main PC at the moment.

It all seems kind of flaky. When I booted up this morning I had the problem, then At one point I had hi-res at the login screen, but low res once I logged in. Then I had my resolution back, including all the options in video preferences, but no icons at all on my desktop.So I fiddled a bit with my video res and refresh and eventually my icons returned. Last time I checked it was ok.

Hmm I used this box for years with Windows and had no problem. Only in the last few months I've been playing with Linux have I had the problem. We'll see how it goes.