Ubuntu 10.04 screen resolutions

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Fabio FZero <fabio.fzero-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| 1. It's 2010. It's high time we're past that kind of issue.
| 2. The videocard is a common, run-of-the-mill, standard, old Intel GMA 950.
| 3. The previous Ubuntu versions worked perfectly (for shame!).
| 
| So guess which distro worked fine out of the box?
| 
| Debian testing.

Without spending *any* time investigating, I assume that the problem
is due to Kernel Mode Setting.

KMS is the future, but the transition has been shaky.

As I understand it, x86_Free and xorg used to do a horrible hack to
set the mode of the video hardware.  It had an 8086 emulator, running
in user-space, interpreting the video BIOS of the display.

With KMS, real kernel code does the mode setting of video hardware.

You can often fix this problem with a "nokms" kernel parameter.  I
have heard that nokms support may be on the way out.

Using the VGA driver would probably work (but not efficiently).  It,
by definition, cannot use KMS.

Using an explicit xorg.conf might allow you to specify the required
settings.

On top of KMS issues, about a release cycle or so ago (6 or 12 months) the
Intel folks made some serious changes to the memory allocation
mechanism in the driver and destabilized the driver.  Unfortunate
since up until then the Intel driver was the only decent
manufacturer-supplied current open-source driver.

| By the way it has seriously improved since they fixed their release
| schedule; you can't really complain that the packages are out of date
| anymore (yes, even in stable).

Nice to know.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists