Sony Laptop has reverted to 800x600 res - [sort of SOLVED]

[solar1951]

Fresh install of Mint 9 Gnome on a sony Vaio laptop with Radeon graphics.
Here is output of lspci

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01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]

Screen was running fine for a few weeks at 1024x768 but now the max is 800x600. As there is no /etc/X11/xorg.conf file I am not sure what to do now.
Ihave tried

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sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

but no change.
Running xrandr shows that this res is possible and puppy will run at 1024x768.

Any assistance please, I have googled but nothing seems to be quite the same.

[dawgdoc]

Which graphics driver are you using? Did you install the proprietary ATI drivers?

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inxi -G

[solar1951]

Which graphics driver are you using? Did you install the proprietary ATI drivers?

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inxi -G

No according to the system no propriertary are available

[dawgdoc]

Possibly some update caused the reversion. The easy option first (although you probably have tried this)

Menu > Preferences > Display (?) to set the resolution to your choice.

If this does not work, then you could install the proprietary drivers. and try to set the resolution
Menu > Administration (?) > Hardware Drivers

I'm at work on WinXP and can not actually check the Menu to make sure I gave the correct path.

[solar1951]

As I said there are no proprietary drivers available for this card, and there were no updates associated with video or Xorg.
What I really need is a copy of an Xorg.conf file that will force the 1024x768 res on this card.

What terminal commands do I need to run to find out which driver is being used ? OK sorry I'm dumb saw it in your post above

[solar1951]

OK, it appears that this is the driver in use

MESA DR1 R100 (RV200 4C57) 20090101 X86/MMX/SSE2 TCL DR12 GLX version 1.3 MESA 7.7.1

[dawgdoc]

You are correct, this is not a proprietary driver. To see if you can change the settings of this driver, MESA, by

Menu > Preferences > Display (?) to set the resolution to your choice.

If this does not resolve the problem, let me know and when I get off work I may be able to spend some time searching the forums; looking for an xorg.conf used in Helena or Isadora that is set for ATI graphics, the R100/RV200 chipset

[solar1951]

Hi dawgdoc and thanks for your interest I have managed a workaround without resorting to generating an xorg.conf file

For interests sake this is what I carried out.
Carried out some man xrandr searches and confirmed that the monitor could handle 1024x768

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xrandr --query

Used synaptic to install a program called arandr
Ran the program and selected LVDS and changed the resolution to 1024x768 then saved this as a shell script - all possible within the program
Then added this shell script, having made it executable, to my start up programs.

I had to do this for all users.

A bit of a pain and probably not "clean" enough for the purists, but I am a builder not a code-monkey

[dawgdoc]

Good Job,

I have seen the name of the xrandr program but never used it, had not heard of arandr until now. I have been fortunate on my few installs of Mint. I will keep this in mind when I see others with graphics trouble.