Debian changed screen resolution on me & how fast is my connection?

pantherlehr · 05-30-2008, 06:27 PM

I've successfully installed Debian (40r3 - Etch (?)) on an older computer last night(an old Athlon 800Mhz Slot A) and the windowed system (Gnome I believe) looked great at 1600X1200.

I purchased an external modem to connect to the internet today due to the fact that the room that the computer is in doesn't get DSL (high speed). Hence the need for the external modem.

Anyhoo, I shut the sytem down to install the modem and when I started up the system, the greatest resolution that it would give me was
640X480. Boy was I.....annoyed!!!!

I'm assuming that there is a configuration file somewhere that I can alter to fix my problem, but I'm still new to Linux. And there is an awful lot of programs and config files on this system.

If someone could point me in the proper direction (man page or faq - there's an awful lot of them on the internet) to help me resolve this, I'd be most appreciative.

As far as the external modem is concerned, while I've been able to access the internet through my ISP with the dial-up connection, I was wondering is there is some way to determine my connect speed as in Windows.
And are there any Linux programs/utilities that I can use to control the modem in any way at all (modem commands anything else)?

Thankx for the time and thankx for any and all information that someone may be able to provide.

mrrangerman · 05-30-2008, 08:09 PM

The file you want to edit is called xorg.conf it's location is /etc/X11/xorg.conf here is the two parts you will want to edit.

1st

Quote:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Generic Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
HorizSync 30-83
VertRefresh 56-75
EndSection

Use a editor to edit it nano, vi, gedit, open a terminal window and login as root the first thing you want to do is make a copy of your xorg.conf file.
Change into the X11 directory like so cd /etc/X11 press enter.
make a backup of xorg.conf like so cp xorg.conf xorg.conf.old

Now edit the file editor-name xorg.conf put in the right Horiz and VertR for your monitor.

then edit the modes section put the default you want to have at bootup to the left, like on this one default would be 1024x768 then when your done save and exit then restart Xserver

You can restart X by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Backspace at the same time.

2nd

Code:

 
SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Modes           "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection

pantherlehr · 05-30-2008, 11:03 PM

That did the trick.

It even survived a shut-down and restart sequence.

Much Thankx 'masked stranger'!!!

P.S. Is there anyplace I can look to get some control over my external modem.

I'm only able to connect by "activating" it from the 'networking' drop-down menu.
And I can only disconnect by pulling the plug on it.