Hello guys! I have a very NB question but it is one which is in my mind since a long time ago:

Let's say I have a dist. in runlevel 5, in other words, it always start X at system startup.

So I decide to buy a new monitor. It means, new horizontal and vertical frequences and, as it is said, it can be damaged if I choose the wrong values. I turn off the computer, switch the monitor and turn it on again. What I suppose it will happen? My linux will enter in the runlevel 5 with the old monitor frequences. It should not only not start X, but damage the new monitor, correct? So what do I have to do, change the configs to runlevel 3 before turning off the comp. and switching my monitor? And then manually config X again?

If this is correct, I have another question: and if I am using Linux with an old monitor for ex. and suddenly BOOM! the monitor stops working and there is no option to fix it (or probably it is better buying a new one than trying to fix the old one). I had no time to change my config to boot in runlevel 3. How would I do it then?

Thanks for the attention and sorry if it is a common question and someone has asked this before. I searched this forum until the page 6 with the word "new monitor" and didn't find anything related to that.

AFAIK, the real issue would come if you attempted to drive the monitor at a higher rate than it was designed for. Does not seem likely if your new monitor is at least as capable as your old one.

Hmmmm I think it is possible, maybe switching from an old PHILIPS who does 30-70 ; 50-160 to a new LG Flat monitor who does 30-63 ; 56-75 ?

This was definitely true in the past, but new (as well as all relatively modern) monitors have built-in controls that prevent the monitor from attempting to cope with incompatible refresh rates. Instead, if the video settings are outside of what the monitor can handle, then it will just display an "Out Of Range" error. I suppose if you still had concerns about possible damage, once you connect the new monitor, you could always do an initial boot from a Live CD such as Knoppix (which has excellent hardward detection capabilities) to see what settings it's using.

As for your second question, if your old monitor "goes BOOM!" then quite frankly I think your only choice would be to buy a new monitor. True hardware failures are not fixable by tweaking a config file or something similar.

Good luck with it. I recently replaced my huge (and heavy) 17" CRT with an LCD flat panel, and wow, what a difference. The image rendering is sharper, plus I got my desk back. For the first couple of days, seeing all that empty space in front of my keyboard made me think someone had stolen my monitor

Hey J.W.!

Thanks a lot for the answer! I am thinking about doing the same thing: I have an old, huge, heavy PHILIPS 107S 17" and I am thinking about buying a new LCD Flat one (17" too) at the beginning of March. And I would hate to see it damaged because of my old monitor's frequence, but if you say that this kind of monitors have already a protection against this, it makes me much less worried about that. Maybe I could use the livecd to mount my linux partition and edit xorg.conf? So the new settings would work immediately. Yes, this might be a good idea...

And just one more question (this might sound even more NB than the first one): If I have a Radeon video card and switch that to nVidea for ex. (or another one very different one), is there any chance of damaging my video card? Or would just X not init anymore, and nothing more than that?

Assuming you turn off your PC before switching cards, there should be no problem in changing from one card to another.

Once you do change a card though, it's probably useful to rerun xorconfig, in order to optimize your video settings