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Remove X and Add X Back

It was surprisingly simple.

sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg
sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

For good measure, I rebooted the machine – there was a kernel update yesterday anyway, so a reboot was needed. The GUI login screen was displayed on the DVI connected monitor. I turned on the VGA connected monitor and after a few seconds, it mirrored 100% the first display. Not what we want.

Dual Monitors Under Nouveaux

I run Lubuntu, so the menus are a little different than for stock Ubuntu but you should be able to find something similar.

• System
  • Preferences
    • Monitors
      brought up the Monitor Preferences tool. This tool looks like the /usr/bin/nvidia-xconfig tool, but simpler. Unchecked “same image in all monitors” and pressed the Detect monitors button. It found the Gateway 24" VGA connected monitor, but didn’t find the Asus DVI connected one – listing the 2nd monitor as Unknown. Perhaps this isn’t a problem. You can just run

      gnome-display-properties

      to start the same program.

I selected the Gateway and set the resolution to 1920×1200 (16:10) + Apply. It flickered then the native resolution for the Gateway was displayed. Nice. Then selected the unknown monitor and was disappointed to only see low resolution options in 4×3 or 16×9 aspect ratios of 1024×768 or 848×480 or lower resolution options. This unknown monitor is 16×9, but should natively do 1920×1080.

Running

xrandr -q

Along the way, I looked for the much wanted /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to appear. It never did. If it had, I’m very comfortable setting screen offsets and screen resolutions. I need to discover where the Monitor Preferences stores the configuration data so I can manually edit it. I really dislike when programs duplicate existing settings, but not in the normal file. A little searching found a file in ~/.config/monitors.xml with the expected settings. A little editing and life should be good, but it wasn’t. This guide may help me.

I’ll logout and back in, perhaps that will reset the display options. I don’t want to revert to a reboot – that’s how Windows works, not Linux. Nope. No joy.

Fail!

So the point of this effort was to find a more stable X/Windows driver. Within a few hours of use, even without getting the 2nd monitor resolution the way I wanted, the machine had locked up while using Google Maps. BRS was the only answer – Big Red Switch. I quickly rebooted the server to start again. Opening FireFox again offered to reopen all the old pages, which I accepted. It locked up again with another BRS event required. I like journaled file systems. The next time, I didn’t allow google maps to open, but I did allow all the other tabs/pages to open. I’m typing in a tab now. It was definitely Google Maps.

I’ll be removing the Nouveau drivers and replacing them with the nvidia driver and I’m strongly considering swapping the graphics card for a newer or more powerful card.

• Current: G73 [GeForce 7600 GS]
• Option 1: GeForce 220 (purchased for a Win7 machine that didn’t work well at all with the 7600-GS)
• Option 2: NVIDIA Quadro (arrived with a virtual machine server)

This is TBD. Right now, I need to check on the virtual machine status for the VMs that run under this system. Locking up so the power button is needed isn’t good for any system, but it is especially bad for virtual machines. Very bad.