Can our Live CD's / fresh installs have a higher resolution?

[locutus]

I was trying to discover why *buntu's have such a poor default screen resolution (800x600) when I came across this quote in a wiki: "Currently, 1024x768 is regarded as an acceptable default. As of July, 2002..." (from a wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution . Scroll down to "Computers have higher resolutions").

Well, that's a higher resolution than our current default, and it's from 7 years ago!!! My laptop is 17". My desktop is 24". Do you have any idea how silly 800x600 looks on a 24" screen?

A couple of years ago, when all we had to do was edit the xorg file to change resolutions, the default was often 1024x768 but it had listed everything lower and also higher up to 1280x1024. Screens have come a long way very fast in the last few years. So why do we have such silly default resolutions? I know, it's not us, it's ubuntu. But we change so much from what ubuntu gives us, could we not also change to a better resolution than what was common on CRT's +/- 10 years ago? I vaguely remember using a 800x600 resolution, on a 14" CRT!

Most other distros probe for hardware and give a proper display. IMHO, Mint looks behind the times with such a poor default. Please, please do something about this for Mint 7.

EDIT: was just reading the specs on netbooks: 8.9 inch display with a 1024x600 resolution. So my example above was, if anything, too optimistic: a 14" CRT could probably have handled 1024x768.

[grimdestripador]

If the distro detects the video card, then it uses a pretty high resolution.
If the distro does not detect the video card, then it goes into extra compatability mode that ubuntu set at 800x600. This is because any VGA interfase is capable of those scanning frequencies.

Isn't there a way to set resolution on live cd. some other distros use vga=775 boot option.