johnk300

Thanks.
I booted to "Recovery mode", browsed /etc/X11 and found that whatever the "fix" steps did, they apparently backed up xorg.conf to xorg.conf.original-0.
I renamed the new one xorg.conf.bad (for later investigation) and restored from the backup, rebooted and all is well again.

>cd /etc/X11
>ls -l xorg.conf*
>sudo mv xorg.conf xorg.conf.bad
>sudo cp xorg.conf.original-0 xorg.conf

... Reboot

But still: how do I set screen resolution to 1280x1024? Or 32 bit color?
I tried adding "1280x1024" to the Modes lines in all Display subsections and adding a Level 32 subsection, rebooted, but no difference. Guess I need better ATI driver.

fnerkyboy

Gday Gang.

This may be old news by now, but I have just installed Edubuntu 6.10
on a Compaq Presario SR1500AN with the following specs:

ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Graphics Chip, AMD Sempron 3000+ CPU.

The reason I am posting is straight out of the box I could only get a screen resolution of 800x600 at 60Hz.

After following sumitsen's advice about downloading and installing the restricted fglrx driver, I was left with a black screen and a blinking power led on my el-cheapo monitor .

I then reverted xorg.conf to the saved version (xorg.conf.original-0)
which took me back to the original lo-res setup.

(by the way, there is no need to reboot after any of these changes, as linux and xfree (X11/xorg) are separate entities, ie a GUI running on top of an OS, and unlike back in windoze-land, the two can be controlled separately.
Instead of CTRL-ALT-DELETE, use CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE, which restarts the X-server (xorg) without restarting the whole os (linux).)

(WARNING: only do this if you can't start X-server, or if it gets hopelessly frozen, as I don't know if any files get saved before the X-server restarts)

sorry about all those brackets, this post is starting to look like LISP code

anyway, the next step in my experiment was to try bigtomrodney's advice,
namely editing xorg.conf and replacing the line:-

Driver "ati"

with:-

Driver "fglrx"
.

I now have 1024x768 at 60Hz, which is good enough for web browsing etc. but I would like to increase the refresh rate also. Any ideas folks?

Sorry this has been so long-winded, but it is my first post to any kind of forum, let alone this one, and it is now 2:30 am local time and I have had several glasses of red wine.

Thanks,

Fred Nerk (fnerkyboy)

demaLinux

Had a similar problem - well worse it came out as "out of scan range" on the monitor.

I used text terminal 1 (ctrl+alt +F1) and logged in and changed some lines in the
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
e.g.
cd /etc/X11
sudo nano xorg.conf

adding the refresh rates to the new sections added by the ATI update
Identifier "aticonfig-Monitor[0]"

Playing with the refresh rates is a bit dangerous but since the monitors seem quite capable of reporting out of range then . . . . .

But upping the last values seems to allow faster refresh rates at higher resolutions.

wyverns

I too have a similar problem but I don't get any response such as sound, just a black screen from where I then have to alt-ctrl-del to reboot, I followed the directions described by sumitsen's post.

I am running ubuntu 7.04 on an amd Athlon 64 with a radeon xpress 200 series on board video. I am new to Linux/ Ubuntu.

My intention was to increase screen resulution higher than 1024 x 768 and to maybe get s-video working.

the I know how to recover is by reinstalling ubuntu

I am going to try bigtomrodney's suggestion and see if it works