Unchangeable screen resolution
 

After upgrading from fc5 to fc6 I am unable to set my screen resolution correctly.
Monitor Samsung 243T, 24 inch 1920x1200, nv driver

Worked fine under fc5, now am unable to set res higher than 1600x1200.

While I don't claim to be an expert, I have edited a lot of X config files over the last ten years. (and read a whole lot more over the last couple of days!)

system-config-display correctly shows my monitor and nv driver but will not allow 1920x1200 resolution. Strangely enough, the utility System->Prefs->screen resolution shows a different set of resolutions than does xorg.conf.

The problem appears to be some form of automatic detection system that is not working correctly. Changes made by hand to xorg.conf are ignored(!) and/or produce unintended results or sometimes simply overwritten.
I have tried Option "ModeValidation" "No DFPNativeResolutioncheck" with no results. Either I have the option or syntax wrong or this option is being ignored.

My preference for a solution would be to find a way to disable this automatic behavior so that I could edit the conf file. However, at this point (basically having an unusable system) any resolution (pun intended) would be great.

Thanks

Two suggestions:

One select the Generic LCD monitor that matches your monitors native resolution, if you have not already have done something similar.

Two add the rpm package: http://zod.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=118 and when done do something like;

yum install nvidia-x11-drv nvidia-x11-drv-96XX

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have tried the generic monitor as you suggest. First, system-config-display will not let me choose this as an option. When selected from the drop down and OKed it just won't change from the default (and correct) Samsung 243T. It just ignores my input. Secondly, if I edit the config file by hand to chose the generic LCD it seems to make no difference. Occasionally the file will just be overwritten the next time I check. Regardless, it makes no difference.

In fact, since my original post I went ahead and installed the nvidia driver. Works perfectly.

My real concern is with what I perceive as an unhealthy trend in this type of software. It seems as if we are going down the Windows path here. There are automatic systems working in the background that I have no apparent control over. As I said in my first post, I am not an expert but classify myself as an educated user. I have spent more than 20 hours on this problem, split between reading and trying various 'things'. So it is not as if I'm too lazy to RTFM. After all of this effort, I still am not sure if the problem is in X or some Fedora thing. To date no one has has been able to offer an explanation for this systems' behavior.

I don't want to give the wrong impression here, I'm all in favor of making systems easier to use/configure. If my setup had been detected/configured correctly I may never have known there was a problem with the software. I believe that this system (X or Fedora) as now implemented, is a step in the wrong direction.

I also had the same problem you describe. I am also unable to change my screen resolution to 1680x1050 on my 22" widescreen, despite manually configuring the xorg.conf file, the monitors, and the screen resolution in GNOME. I had this problem in FC6 and Mandriva 2007

The best experience I have had with X server is with Ubuntu. Was able to go 1680x1050 back and forth with no problem using standard vesa driver

You're the second person is as many days complaining about not being able to get that high res, I know with my gforce 6800 and the kmod-nvidia in FC6, 1600x1200 appears to be tops. Unless somebody steps up and says "Bull....".