Hi,

I am using Slack 10.2 and Fluxbox as my window manager. However, I've been having difficulties trying to set my screen to 1280x1024, or anything other than 800x600 (I think that's what it is, my desktop is really small...).

I've messed around with my xorg.conf, right now my Screen section looks like this:

______________________________________________________________________
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen 1"
Device "** NVIDIA (generic) [nv]"
Monitor "My Monitor"
DefaultDepth 24
DefaultFbbpp 32
Subsection "Display"
Depth 24
FbBpp 32
Modes "1280x1024"
# ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
EndSection

_____________________________________________________________________

Now, I've tinkered with it, so it is very likely that i may have messed it up. X starts with no problems, but with the small resolution. I've searched the forums and have tried some of the stuff people have posted, but nothing seems to work yet.

Thanks.

Hi!

The problem is that you need another graphics driver. Xorg just doesn't have a driver for your card and therefore takes the generic VGA driver which doesn't make more than 600x400 or something. You should go to nVIDIA's website and download a driver for your card. Then use xorgconfig which is a much easier utility to use.

Good luck!

Hey in your xorg.conf file make sure that you have the proper refresh rates for the horizontal and vertical of your monitor, you may also want to take a look into the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see what the server is detecting as it starts up.

Thanks guys. I am going to give this a shot again today.

Dino, the strange thing is that I had a bigger resolution before I downloaded and installed the Nvidia drivers. After I installed them and made the changes to the xorg.conf the screen resolution shrunk.

Monitor: LG Flatron L1710S
Graphics card: nvidia geforce 6600 GT
CPU: Intel P4, 2.4 gHz, IA32
Distro: Slack 10.2

I am also using Slack 10.2 and I had the exact same problem. The nvidia driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-8762) kept using the 800x600 resolution even though I had a 1280x1024 mode in xorg.conf In the following I will describe how I solved the problem and got a 1280x1024 resolution

First of all I made sure that I had the proper horizontal and vertical refresh rates for my monitor as mentioned previously by HappyTux. That just was not enough to solve the problem.

I browsed the Web and found out, that there is something called "EDID" (short for Extended Display Identification Data). nvidia uses EDID to obtain information about the monitor. If there is somehow something wrong with that information (perhaps because of wrong driver for the monitor?) then nvidia discards all modes in xorg.conf and falls back to a default resolution (800x600). This turned out to be my problem.

I could not get a driver for my LG monitor as the site had technical problems, so I found out how to make nvidia ignore EDID. It is done by adding the line

in the device section, something like

Since this prevents nvidia from obtaining techinical specs for the monitor via EDID I had to make my own modeline by using a modeline generator. I used XFREE86's modeline generetor at http ://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xtiming.pl and inserted the modeline

in the monitor section, something like

WARNING! IF YOU DO SOMETHING LIKE THIS YOU TAKE THE RISK OF DAMAGING YOUR HARDWARE BECAUSE THOSE NUMBERS ARE USED TO CONTROL THE HARDWARE!

In my screen section I can now refer to the above modeline, something like

This worked for me

It is helpful to check /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Somewhere in this log file nvidia reports back. Good luck!