[NBLUG/talk] Kubuntu resets screen resolution to 640x480 after restart

Andrew argonaut at gmx.co.uk
Mon Nov 3 15:21:31 PST 2008


Lincoln Peters wrote on Sun, 2 Nov 2008 11:05:32 -0800:

> 2. Ran "dpkg-reconfigure xorg".  Not sure if anything happened
> when I did.
[snip]
> 4. Ran "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg".  Got several prompts
> unrelated to screen resolution; kept the defaults on all of
> them.
[snip]
> And now it's working.
[snip]
> Anyone have any idea what might have happened that fixed it?

It was the second command. The "xorg" package is just a
metapackage. It doesn't do anything except depend on other
packages (notably "xserver-xorg").

Running "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" is The Debian Way to
configure the X Server. It asks you a number of questions about
your hardware and preferences (for example, screen resolution,
keyboard layout, etc.) and produces an xorg.conf file (the old
config will be moved to a backup file). The xorg.conf file can
still be tweaked by hand, but using dpkg-reconfigure helps to
avoid human mistakes.

By the way, each of the questions has a priority associated with
it and dpkg-reconfigure won't always present the low-priority
questions to you. You can get greater control of the reconfigure
process by adding the -plow (--priority=low) switch to the
command.

Newer versions of Xorg (included in recent releases of Ubuntu)
do a better job of auto-detecting hardware. Consequently, the
number of questions asked when you run "dpkg-reconfigure
xserver-xorg" has been reduced.


> Oh, and yes, I *will* set up their computer before I leave so
> that I can SSH in remotely should something like this happen
> again.

Returning to the subject of dynamic DNS, be aware that the
DDNS clients built into some routers (mine included) will send
an update only if they detect a change in the external IP
address. This is a problem if (1) your address rarely changes
(mine has changed once in two and a half years with Sonic.net)
and (2) you have a free dynamic DNS account that expires if not
updated regularly. Rather than use the ineffective client in my
router, I run ipcheck.py ( http://ipcheck.sourceforge.net ) on
an internal machine. It scrapes my router's status page to get
the external IP address and sends an update to DynDNS.org if the
address has changed OR if it's been 25 days or more since the
last update. So my DynDNS account is always kept current.

A.



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