Setting maximum resolution for Nvidia 6800 under Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

Immediately following my recent successful installation of Ubuntu 7.04 beta on my IBM ThinkPad Z61m came the official release -- on time, as expected.  However, like the 20070415 daily build on which the live release is based, there is some kind of a display problem on the laptop.

Running the same live CD (which had passed the CD tester, of course) worked just fine on my desktop, so I went ahead and installed it (replacing the Herd 5 alpha I'd been running). 

The machine is a generic homebuilt, which has an Intel D845GBV motherboard, 2.4Ghz P4, 1Gb RAM, and an added (older) SATA controller with a WD Raptor 150 (plus some EIDE drives).  The video card is an XFX FG6800 XTreme 256MB DDR3 DUal DVI TV -- way overkill for what I do, but the cheapest card with dual DVI (coding requires a hi-res dual-monitor, to me, at least!)

I used a generic partitioning scheme:

with the rest free space for now.

Installation went flawlessly; enabling the Nvidia restricted drivers got Desktop Effects working, but the resolution was set to an unusably low value.  Google found some articles to read;  the one that worked suggested running the Nvidia config program:

sudo nvidia-settings

This opens a very useful GUI; setting the resolution to 1680x1050 was a snap (though I forgot to click the Save button, so I had to re-run that upon booting up this morning!) -- note that if you don't run this with sudo, you won't be able to save the config file, though the rest of the GUI will work just fine.

Note that the only setting I changed was the Resolution dropdown in the X Server Display Configuration page (the GUI comes up on the X Server Information page), though the other pages are worth looking at.  And of course, I also clicked the Save to X Configuration File button . . . the second time, that is! 

Here's a screenshot (Alt-PrtScr in Ubuntu/Gnome is an easy way to save screen captures; I accepted the default, Desktop; lots of other ways to do that):

 NVidia Settings screen capture

3 Comments  |  Linux  | 
Posted 4/21/07 @ 3:18 AM by Tracy Logan

Comments

Thanks for the info. That's exactly what I needed to to fix my resolution as well.
Posted by Jon @ 5/3/07 11:39 PM

Thanks dude...worked like a charm.
Posted by Jonathan @ 5/17/07 3:07 PM

Thank you - that did the trick.
Posted by Boris @ 8/3/07 7:50 PM