Dell Inspiron 1100 Screen Resolution

[spednik]

Hello all.

I have a dell inspiron 1100, 512 ram, BIOS A32, to start off.

I installed FC4, and my screen resolution is at 640x480, with no way to change it.

This is some kind of X problem i suspect, but am a complete fool, and have no i dea on how to fix it.

If someone could give me step by step instructions, on how to, that would be great. I'm sure it is a common problem, becuase i didnt touch anything, the resolution problem was right off the install.

thanks in advance.

[spednik]

why no responses

[My1CPU]

Originally Posted by spednik

why no responses

It could, perhaps, be your request that someone hold your hand and wipe your nose without at least finding the klenex for yourself. Lets try this......

Hi gurus,

I too am having the problem that spednik describes, just not on a laptop. At first I thought it was the VESA driver problem that I have read extensively about over the last few days. Then I realized it was not that, although I have seen it on another machine. Here is my problem:

After installing FC4 for the 8th time or so I wised up and selected the 640 x 480 resolution figuring that some screen would be better than nothing. I am having the same problem on two very different machines so I will concentrate on one and apply to the other. I have a Dell Optiplex GX 60 that I installed FC4 on with the "everything" option since this will be my play computer for learning about Linux. This machine is on its way to being dual booted with WinXP but I messed up and put the Grub boot loader in the MBR instead of the boot partition, but I will fix that later.

When I selected the 640x 480 my intent was to just work in that resolutuion until I can find the fix, but I am finding that many of the dialogs and windows are larger than the screen and therefore I must do the guess and count tabs to select certain controls....a task I am entirely comfortable doing in windows where I have lived almost all of my life, but it is very diffiecult to do given I have never seen some of the windows in question, but I digress.

I have found the Hardware browser which shows me one video card...Intel Corp 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics D.....which HB reports the manufacturer as unknown and the Driver as intelfb. I have found and experimented with the /etc/X11/xorg.conf but to no avail, though I must confess it was mostly chaning stuff not knowing what I was changing. My current xorg.conf has the following sections:

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "Monitor0"
	VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
	ModelName    "Unknown monitor"
	HorizSync    31.5 - 37.9
	VertRefresh  50.0 - 70.0
	Option	    "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "i810"
	VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
	BoardName   "Intel 845"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Videocard0"
	Monitor    "Monitor0"
	DefaultDepth     8
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     16
		Modes    "800x600" "640x480"
	EndSubSection
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     8
		Modes    "640x480"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

One of the "display" sub sections shows a 800x600 option but I can not activate it. Even if I could it is not sufficient for my needs, I need to go higher and know that the card and moniter together can from use in WindowsXP.

I am heading off now to see if I can find some drivers from the Dell site, but what I need from you folks is two things. One I need some direction to a decent HOWTO on installing the drivers. Also, as a matter of clarification for me, could someone explain the relation ships between X11, Gnome, and KDE? I am thinking that they are all GUI programs, but from some of the things I read it seems like Gnome resides on top of X11? Or am I just imagining this?

Thanks in advance for any help!

My1CPU