[PLUG] Help! Display at 640x480!

[John Jason Jordan]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2019 14:55:01 -0700
Johnathan Mantey <manteyjg at gmail.com> dijo:

>How did you solve the problem?

I started with the GUIs, the one from NVIDIA and the one in the Xfce
settings manager. Neither had any way to change the resolution; in
fact, after poking at them for half an hour I decided they were
useless. 

Then I moved on to the Xfce Settings Editor (also a GUI), which
did have places to change the resolution. However, there were no
instructions, and no 'Apply' button, so after making a change I had to
reboot to see if I had accomplished anything. And there were different
places to make changes so I had to try various combinations to see if I
could hit on the magic combination.

Eventually, I concluded that the Settings Editor was also useless, so I
spent a lot of time with xrandr. I never could get it to change
anything, and finally I discovered that whatever you do with it goes
away on rebooting, so I moved on.

The NVIDIA 'drivers' were listed in Synaptic, so I just reinstalled
them (two different files). But that did nothing, so I uninstalled them
and then installed the Nouveau driver. Again, no luck. There are about
20 different NVIDIA drivers, all named with meaningless letters and
numbers, making it difficult to figure out which was the correct one
for my GTX 765M chip. In desperation I decided to download the correct
driver from NVIDIA, as they at least had a search function that worked.
But their 'driver' is actually a shell script, so rather than install
it I went back to Synaptic and picked a driver that had the same
numbers '375' as the shell script, and installed it. And then finally,
here I am back with a working display at 1920x1080.

Now, you might think that this should have taken no more than an hour,
and you'd be right, except for the hours I spent searching the net for
instructions on how to use the tool that I was working with at the
time. That was the frustrating part.