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Linux loading wrong resolution with ATI card

Posted By Scott Klarr on Feb 27, 2008 at 3:16 am

If you recently made changes to your display settings on a linux distro while using an ATI video card, the chances are good that you may come to realize just how badly ATI video cards are with linux. Your resolution or refresh rate may be out of bounds during bootup which can be very frustrating especially for a newbie. Here is a solution that worked for me to overcome this issue.

When you get to the point there the screen goes blank (and you monitor may give an error dialog saying wrong resolution or refresh rate), hit CTRL+ALT+F1. This will take you into the console.

Login as root and then run the following commands:

Make sure to replace 1680x1024 with the native resolution of your monitor.

You should now be logged out and back to the login prompt. Hit CTRL+ALT+F7 to return to the GUI that is out of bounds.

Hit CTRL+ALT+Backspace to force the X server to commit suicide.

The X server should now close out and automatically try to restart, or it will freeze (its not supposed to, but its happened to me), or it will take you to the command line prompt. If you get taken to the command line, you can either restart the computer (CTRL+ALT+Delete) or login and enter the command X to attempt to start the x server again.

Hopefully this will solve this issue for you :)

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