I disagree: Thinking is what men do do.

No matter

If you are having trouble, help us to help you by posting the command(s) you tried, and the error messages you received. Please do not be vague - "I got an error message", be precise.

Unlike windows, linux tries to tell you exactly what went wrong, where, when and why.

This is useful.

And please do not abbreviate your posts as txt-spk. It is both annoying and leads to confusion.

Quick piping lesson:

command > command.out 2>&1
pipes the errors and messages of something flying past you. If you ran X -configure as a user, it might fail to write the xorg.conf and put it on stdout.

The other regular trick is this

command1 |command2 |command3 |command4 etc.

sends the output of 1 command to the input of command2, etc. There are piles of these listed somewhere everybody should know about and have read. You will gather I fail on both counts.

What???!!!---Do you mean we should just hang you on the wall with a feeding tube?

But of course. The first time I red this, it didn't make the connection Now i do.
I am going to try piping in a minute. Our isp has problems and I want to catch up on a few things while it is partly working. Only get less than .06% net usage right now,

Veerryy interesting! If I stop grub with a c I get a sh----prompt #which I guess is a shell. If I let grub finish,and select ubuntu recovery, I get the cute red white blue box. Selecting the. about third one, I get a root prompt. As root most things worked but an invalid command or such and root told me so. Sometimes giving suggestion which I guess were files where the command could be used. One wrong entry got me a bash prompt. I tried find for grub and it said grub was not installed, but I could install it by typing "apt-get install grub." That was confusing because because I got there from grub. Maybe I am just not understanding fully what it said.

If grub's not there, you will know about it if you reboot!
Thinking it through, we only install grub in one system usually whereas I usually have at least 2 systems. I think the grub on this box was from an ubuntu distro that I hastily wiped.

For sure, I would not be able to get there without grub. My grub came from a distro disk so should be good. Dlds could have an almost un-seeable error. I will; just keep mudling through until I get it right. I am to close to give to now.

Up date:
I decided to take the easy way out and hookup my old 300 mhz Compaq. I have run several Linux distros. Only trouble now is I need to find the Lan card I had temporarily removed. Either that or buy one because I think the old one went bad. Always something. Anyway since I have run several distros, I am sure it can handle the display. I should have it online in a couple days.

I had this question in Newbies for a time but could not get a workable solution. I am trying to put the latest version of Ubuntu 9.xxx on this computer using dual boot with windblows xp pro. Everything appears to be ok until it tries to display the desk top. Then it goes horizontal with many many lines making it unreadable. This I gather is due to asking the monitor to display at the wrong rate. The trouble lies in finding a way in to change it. As far I can tell it only wants to use 60k hertz. I find no other. What speed could the distro be asking it to go. About the closest I get is in through selecting recovery mode. I just never get to see the x file or even grub so that I could change it.

Install package xresprobe to get your monitor's sync & refresh rates. To do this, enter Use this information to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Copy to master.xorg.conf first, although it looks like you have nothing much to lose you need to make sure you can retrace.
Your "monitor" section should look something like this, put in the rates you need. There are several editors, is good:
Note the commenting out of Option "DPMS" "true"

Another possibility, looking at the "screen" section:
If DefaultColorDepth is 24, change to 16.

There are many possibilities for a sample xorg.conf file, but these changes have previously worked for problems such as yours.

I really like this solution. I needed to be told to use gedit. It never occurred to me it should work in this situation. The rest seems easy. Where have I heard that before? I really would like to try it now, at 4:30 am, but I must catch a buss at 7:00 and don't dare let myself get so concentrated on fixing it. I would forget my ride I dare not miss. I should be able to have it done though before 3:00 pm. It will make me very happy to reply from Ubuntu. I will have no trouble getting online since I have highspeed always on. Been there done that recently.

There may be a problem, I should have warned you: without an X session, gedit, which is I believe graphical, will probably not work. As you have no X session as yet, everything has to be done in terminal. Hopefully you will have no trouble getting a terminal up, but if you do, ctrl alt f2 then log in with username & password.
Having done that, there are other editing tools: I don't like vi, prefer nano & pico, both easy to use from terminal.
If you are simply querying your system (ddcprobe etc) just enter the command, but when you modify anything in the system directories including /etc, you need admin privilege, so always sudo before the command.
If you obtain precise information on your monitor rates, either from ddcprobe or from your manual (if you had your monitor from new) then it should be safe to change Xorg.conf. However, if you are guessing for any reason, be careful, as this may damage your monitor.
I'm giving as much info as possible now as I think we may be in different timezones & therefore not online at the same time.
Another point: when I was a newbie, I was using old monitors, and was not able to get a working ubuntu installation. At that time, Debian was recommended for older hardware, so I installed Debian 4.0. All distros have moved on since then, but I still believe Debian provides a very good introduction to Linux for new users.

I would dare say, sonichedghog, that your instructions are right on. Not complete though for a newbie like me. I believe I saw everything as it should be. I hit a brick wall though when it came to copying the file before editing. I need the exact syntax to do it. A little searching through man pages showed me the first part would be mcopy. There were no man pages for the other things. With nothing to lose, I decided to try it and hope for the best. That got me to a second wall. I experimented a little and got edit, not gedit, to show the file. Next wall is wright permission for the file.
Installing the see res thing at the beginning worked without a hitch. I assume I won't need to do that again since it is installed unless I have a major screwup and have to go back to installing Ubuntu 9.10 Which would reformat the linux info partitions.
Your instructions have come the closest yet. Good work. I should have started here:>) not newbies. Those guys were no dummies though.
Boy am I glad I copied this mess before spell checking and posting. My token had expired and I had to reload the page. PHEWWW!

This is how:
to get you into the right directory
this will show you what is now in the directory including the file you have just created
That will get you into the file you are going to edit. Lines that are for information only start with a #. When you change something, it is good practice to insert the # at the start of the line you want to remove, so you can easily restore it - this is what we mean by "commenting out"- and maybe also leave a note either on the same line or a new one after # with the date and the reason for the change, if you wish.
Another nice bit of code, once you have made your change and saved the file:
which will show you the file but won't allow changes.
Write permission? With ubuntu the main user can operate as root but only by entering sudo before the command, you are then prompted to enter your password.
Good luck.

Yeah. Gedit wouldn't work. I just jumped to edit. It was then I had to have admins privileges.
I thought when I went "drop to root from the recovery menu, It was a terminal. Or very close. Not sure if I did stick sudo in there or not on that one. Have to give that another try.
I believe I already am administrator. There are no other users besides me, but I do have to enter my password for some things. there is no other user accounts that I know of. Everytime I need to reset the clock, it would ask for my password which was only good for a limited time. That knowledge comes from other distros.
I did see a list of rates and resolutions I didn't know were available. I would stick close to 60 hertz. No way I am going to 80 hertz no matter how good it looks.
If that was your monitor in the other mess then we are running the same brand. I don't see the model number on the front, but it is a samsung syncmaster 500s on the front. an oldy but goody.
I was working on it's predecessor when I looked up to see smoke coming out of it. Rate hadn't been touched for quite a while, but yeah she was smoking. Good thing I was there or I might not be here.
I am in eastern time zone in ny. The time zone or whatever would just delay things. Or maybe make a reformat neccesary because I didn't wait for your reaction. I use to run norton's ghost. That made an image of every bite on the drive. If used carefully, make sure it is ok before you save it etc, and it would get rid of the worst virus out there because it reformated, then restored from the image. Give it 6 minutes and that bug was GONE.
Right now it is 8 pm here and time for me to put my 71 year old buns to bed.