[PLUG] Help! Display at 640x480!

[Ben Koenig]

nvidia has layers of drivers for their cards going all the way back to 
the tnt2 cards. On more than one occasion I've seen an ubuntu system 
automagically install the wrong one and all kinds of stuff happens.

And I'm saying that from a tech support perspective, not because I hate 
Ubuntu. This has been a challenge going back many years.


On 3/18/19 7:11 PM, Tom wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Mar 2019 18:24:25 -0700
> John Jason Jordan <johnxj at gmx.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
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> definitely be careful when installing Nvidia's proprietary "driver"
> from their website. That shell script had hosed one of my systems
> before. Going back into Synaptic was probably your best course of
> action.
>