Comment 19 for bug 151790

I tried the latest Intrepid release and was able to boot the machine. It was more successful though still not correct.

The display came up in 1152x864 which, on a 19" LCD, was stretched. I went to System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution and 1280x1024 wasn't in the Resolution list. "Mirror Screens" was checked (though I only had the LCD plugged into DVI and nothing in the VGA) so I unchecked it. This caused the Resolution list to refresh so I chose 1280x1024. I hit Apply and it said it would write out the configuration and that I'd have to logout for the new configuration to take effect. I logged out and saw the gdm login screen which didn't seem quite optimal so I hit Control-Alt-Backspace to really restart X but it didn't look different.

When I logged in, the bottom panel was at the very top of the screen and the desktop background was... hard to describe. It was as if someone took the smudge tool to the regular intrepid background and made long straight vertical streaks going from top to bottom. I managed to start a terminal and looked at the xorg.conf the previous step had created. It had written a Virtual size of "1280x1888" instead of "1280x1024". I manually edited this, logged out, hit Control-Alt-Backspace, and logged in.

The resolution came up in 1152x864 again. I decided to try 'xrandr'. As in the xrandr output at the very top of this bug it believed I had a display attached to the VGA port when there wasn't anything plugged into it. I looked through 'xrandr -h' and invoked

  xrandr --output VGA-0 --off
  xrandr --output DVI-0 --preferred

and voila the screen changed to 1280x1024. I'm just guessing that the GNOME apps are relying on the xrandr information which is incorrect since there is no VGA attached though the xrandr mechanism thinks it is and uses it as the primary display. Perhaps this bug should be retitled?