On 4 December 2009 at 13:24, Douglas Bates wrote: | This question is vaguely related to R in that I have managed to wedge | the netbook computer that I use for demonstrations of R and I would | like to know how to un-wedge it so I can continue to give lectures | about R. | | I have an ASUS eee PC running the netbook-remix version of Ubuntu | 9.10. The X server in 9.10 is a little different from earlier | versions in that it does not require an explicit configuration file | for the X server ( /etc/X11/xorg.conf, IIRC) as it can autoconfigure. | That it did fine. | | When I attached the netbook to the VGA input for the video projector | in a lecture hall I found that it dropped the resolution to 640 x 480, | which is undesirably coarse. I decided to tinker and see if I could | get it to 800 x 600 on both the built-in display and the video | projector. I used the GUI application accessed through the menu | sequence System -> Preferences -> Display. | | I believe that at one point I actually got things working that way | but, of course, I couldn't leave well-enough alone and decided to try | to get a resolution with 768 lines as I knew the projector supported | that. That was when it all went south. The system froze with a blank | screen and blank projector output. I needed to do a hard power-down | and reboot without the projector plugged in. Fortunately I didn't | lose the disk (I run ext2 file systems as a journaled file system puts | too much wear on the solid-state disk) and I can use the computer | without an external display. | | Now I can use the netbook when it is not connected to an external VGA | display but as soon as I connect the external VGA it freezes, | presumably because it is trying to use an unsupported video mode. The | information on the video modes I selected must be stored somewhere but | I can't find out where. Does anyone know where that GUI application | caches its information? All this GUI configuration is great unless | the thing you are trying to configure is the display and you can't get | that working. In the old days when you needed to edit a text-based | configuration file you had a fighting chance of doing that even if you | could only get the barest of systems, a text console device, running.
Try the 'randr' frontends. I have used both xrandr (from a package of the same name) and the KRandR frontend in KDE on both my older laptop (where I learned about xrandr during UseR :) and my netbook which has a nice but non-standard 'hd' resolution of 1366 x 768. The last time I connected it to a projector I think I simply selected a lower (and more standard) resolution from the KRandR applet in the panel. Oh, and that was with a pre-release of Ubuntu 9.10. Gnome appears to have packages 'gnome-randr-applet' and 'grandr'. And as I understand it, there is no configuration. X11 now does everything dynamically. But I could be wrong. In fact, that is quite likely as I hardware and I usually try our best to ignore each other ... Dirk -- Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions. _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list R-SIG-Debian@r-project.org https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian
