acer monitro

I am also a recent convert from M$ Windows and had a similar problem. I solved my issue by looking under the help menu for the Ubuntu 5.10 Starter Guide and found the instructions for installing the Nvidia (you might have ATI) video card driver.I install the package and copied & pasted the commands into the Terminal and everything was fine.

Yes I have a ATI 3d rage pro. Where did you find the driver? All I have is Windows drivers. I will follow your advice and see if I can find it in the Starter guide.
thank you

Head out to http://easylinux.info/wiki/Ubuntu/ . Check the section about ATI drivers, which will send you to another link (http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu_Installation_Guide).

This is how I got my ATI Rage Pro working. However, I had serious problems trying to play games like America's Army and Nexuiz with it, which was part of the reason I switched to an Nvidia card. It seemed a little better supported in Linux in general than ATI. However, your mileage may vary.

The first link should be http://easylinux.info/wiki/Ubuntu

I added the extra slash by accident. Sorry about that.

Pasted from the Ubuntu 5.10 Starter Guide:

How do I install the 3D ATI video card driver?

       1. Install the xorg-driver-fglrx package with Synaptic (See How do I use Synaptic to install packages?)
          Miscellaneous - Graphical (restricted) > xorg-driver-fglrx
       2. echo fglrx | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

sudo depmod -a ; sudo modprobe fglrx

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup

sudo sed -i -e 's/"ati"/"fglrx"/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf

(Step 2 goes in the Terminal.) There are a couple of other commands listed if you have a NForce2 based motherboard.

Good luck.

Thank you I went to the help section and installed the drivers. But I am at a loss as how to enter the following into the terminal:

 echo fglrx | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

sudo depmod -a ; sudo modprobe fglrx

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup

sudo sed -i -e 's/"ati"/"fglrx"/' /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I have never used terminal. I looked at instructions for its use and got it started. But how do you make it save the above commands? Must you enter them
each time you start the computer?

I can find no save command and even when I entered the commands there was no resolution change. Do I need to reboot perhaps?

Thank you

I'm also new at this so one of you veterans feel free to jump in.

You don't need to "Save" in Terminal. It interprets and executes the commands you type each time you press the Enter key. It is very literal so it's best to copy and paste the commands to avoid typos. These comment windows are rather narrow and wrapped the commands above, so the line above beginning with sudo cp ... goes on one line before you press enter. I double-spaced the lines to show the complete commands. The lines beginning with sudo will require you to enter your password.

You only have to do this once, not each time you start the computer.

I do believe the video drivers load at startup, so you would have to reboot your computer to get the driver to load.

No way am I a veteran! But you might want to look at /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Scroll down to "Device", "Monitor", "Screen" and the Sub Sections. It will list the driver, monitor, and the combination of the two called Screen.
The "sub section" lists the available modes for each color depth....the "Screen" shows the "default depth".
If 1024x768 is not listed in one of the mode lines, you can "gedit" xorg.conf. to include it.(click file>save to save the changes)
There is a very real danger of damaging your monitor if you exceed it's sync and refresh spec's....so be careful.

Ok, I went to the terminal and typed in the first command in the list and it excuted correctly.

Then I pasted in the second command: sudo depmod -a ; sudo modprobe fglrx
and got the below error message.

 Error inserting fglrx (/lib/modules/2.6.12-10-386/volatile/fglrx.ko): No such device

Does this mean I did not properly download the right device driver or does it mean I have the wrong device driver for my old 3d rage pro ATI card?

And thank you Chuck Davis for the help you are giving me here. Greatly appreciated.

We're approaching (already beyond?) the limits of my knowledge & experience here but it sure looks like a driver (fglrx) issue to me. (I wonder what the .ko file extension in the error message means.) Perhaps Mr. Stotts, who replied above, can help.

The Starter Guide does mention one other possibility:

3. If you are using an NForce2-based motherboard you will also need to do the following:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Change “Section "Device"” add the following line:

  Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"

4. Restart your machine for changes to take effect.

Thanks Chuck for the help. I learned a lot about this great operating system just trying to figure all this out. So no wasted time. I do not have the NForce so disregarded that and found out that the card is so old that there are no linux drivers for it.

So i just removed the 17inch monitor and put the 15 inch back online and it looks fine. This is fine as it is just for the kids to learn on. I am so glad to have a compute NOT running M$Windows that I just don't care about this issue!

Thank you again. And thanks to Paul for his offering of help also.
LB

fyi re the volatile problem
ubuntu (and I don't know why) will look in volatile
for the fglrx module instead of where it actually lives.
I haven't been able to figure out how to change that
(garbage) via a config file or some exotic ld/mod command
so I just created a sym link from the volatile dir over to
where it actually lives in bootmisc.sh so the sym link
gets setup every time the system boots.
You might want to check whether fglrx is actually in
the /lib/modules tree with
  find /ib/modules -name 'fglrx*'
and, if it is, add to /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh:
(showing excerpt of file to give a sense of
where you need to add the ln -s):

...
        #
        # Remove ".clean" files.
        #
        rm -f /tmp/.clean
        # USER Additions
        ln -s \
                /lib/modules/2.6.15-26-k7/misc/fglrx.ko \
                /lib/modules/2.6.15-26-k7/volatile/fglrx.ko
}

case "$1" in
    start)
...