Hello,

Sorry if this is a duplicate; I couldn't find an answer to my question. I have a laptop with Nvidia FX Go5700 and have installed Debian Sarge with 2.6.8-2 386 kernel. I could go through the first X configuration menu by selecting the 'vesa' driver ('nv' is not for this card) and things worked well.

I successfully installed the Nvidia driver, went into my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file to change Driver "vesa" to Driver "nvidia".

and all is fine. I would like to get a better resolution than 1024x768 though (the card and monitor are capable of much more) but am not sure of the horizontal and vertical refresh rates. I do know though that the card can do 1600x1200 @60Hz (from Windows XP). So I run (as root):

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

go through the whole selection again, select the 'nvidia' driver and 'medium' to choose the highest resolution the card is capable of. However, once this is over, the configuration tool has not written any updated XF86Config-4 file to disk. It is still the old one sitting there.

I tried moving XF86Config-4 to my home dir and went through the selection again, but to no avail. No file written. Since I am root, I don't see any permission problem.

Being new to Debian, it may be doing something wrong. If anyone has an idea, I'd be very glad.

Thanks in advance

Try:

cat /etc/X11/XF86Config
or
cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf

see if the changes where made there...

Since you have edited the file by hand the md5sum of it has changed and debconf will no longer recognize the file for you to make changes. You can look at the instructions I seem to remember being there in the comments at the top of the file to regenerate the proper md5sum for the new file the try the reconfigure while you are at it you can search the web with your model number and make for your monitor and find the proper values the horizontal and vertical section then during the reconfigure you use these values when asked or you can continue to edit the file by hand put the proper values into the lines where they belong and restart the X server and see if you have better luck with the increased resolution. If you cannot get it going can you post the /etc/X11/XFree86config-4 file you are using along with the /var/log/XFree86.0.log and the details on your monitor?

Sorry for the late reply. This is really useful; I expect this must be a common confusion among Debian newcommers. This was exactly the problem: the md5 sum.
I had edited the file by hand, so Debian didn't want to overwrite it. All is well now.

Thanks !