"Input signal out of range" upon startup

[Bloaty84]

I get this sometimes when booting up 64 bit Jaunty. It says to set the monitor to 1280x1024 60hz, because, for some reason, upon boot it's much lower than that, until the system successfully boots. I can't use the buttons on my monitor to change this this until I get into Ubuntu, which is obviously a moot point. Once in Ubuntu, it sets itself to the right thing automatically. I've also had the same problem with earlier versions. The screen eventually goes black, and I have to reboot. On some occasions, I have to do this literally 50 times before I can get into Ubuntu. I did some googling, and as far as I can tell, I need to press ctrl+alt+f1, then

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

, and do some configuring. The only problem is, how exactly do I go about that? can I use the above command once inside Ubuntu to keep it from having that problem in the next boot?

[reed9]

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg will (re)generate a basic xorg.conf file. Generally, that is the first basic thing to try when running across an issue like this. If it doesn't work, however, you will need to edit the xorg.conf file yourself and put in the appropriate sync rate for your monitor.

Hopefully this guide can help you out with that.

[Rubberman]

What video card / chipset are you using? Do you have the appropriate drivers installed? If you have an nVidia card, you are probably better off installing the proprietary driver that you can download from the nVidia web site instead of the default nv or nvidia driver installed with the system.

[Bloaty84]

I have an ATI Radeon XPress 200 series. I installed the proprietary driver once, but it didn't help. It has since been uninstalled, because I like to use the bare minimum of non-open-source software.

When I use the above command, it first asks me something like "would you like to use a frame kernel buffer", or something to that effect. I have no idea what that means, so I went no further.

[reed9]

Try is with the phigh flag.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

You will only be prompted with questions that don't have reasonable defaults.

man debconf

The dpkg-reconfigure (8) and dpkg-preconfigure (8) commands also let you pass --frontend= to them, followed by the frontend you want them to use.
Note that not all frontends will work in all circumstances. If a frontend fails to start up for some reason, debconf will print out a message explaining why, and fall back to the next-most similar frontend.
low
Very trivial questions that have defaults that will work in the vast majority of cases.
medium Normal questions that have reasonable defaults.
high
Questions that don’t have a reasonable default.
critical
Questions that you really, really need to see (or else).
Only questions with a priority equal to or greater than the priority you choose will be shown to you. You can set the priority value by reconfiguring debconf, or temporarily by passing --priority= followed by the value to the dpkg-reconfigure (8) and dpkg-preconfigure (8) commands, or by setting the DEBIAN_PRIORITY environment variable.

[Bloaty84]

So, there is no way i can accidentally make things worse with that command?

[Rubberman]

So, there is no way i can accidentally make things worse with that command?

Backup your existing /etc/X11/xorg.conf first. After all, "stuff" does happen...