Horrible Harry Linux Screen Resolution

Linux is as lovely as Windows is wonderful. I'm running Horrible Harry, or whatever version H is called.

I have dots. Many dots. 1024 x768 dots exactly.

Took a while to get here.

First of all I tried the "System/Appearance/Visual Effects" trick recommended by playinpearls. It did indeed cause a new Nvidia driver to be installed, but it cut my choices of screen resolution down to 2. No real help there, and now I don't know which version of the video driver I'm running.

But now, thanks to this thread, this page and a Princeton data sheet, I have dots.

I added these two lines to the monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf

HorizSync 30-96
VertRefresh 50-160

The instructions in this thread only mentioned the two key words, they did not say anything about having to append anything, much less what form those values needed. The web page helped there.

So I put these values in and now I can get 1024 x 768, which is entirely adequate, but nowhere near the top resolution of this monitor (Princeton VF912) which is 1600 x 1200. Further, on "System/Preferences/Screen Resolution" when you try to select the resolution, a list appears with a large empty white space at the top. Clicking on "Refresh Rate" gives you a list of five values: 50 thru 55 Hz.

I just realized these limitations may be due to the video card. It looks like there is a way to put in your monitor name and model, but where's the list of valid values?

And why can't you do this super user stuff from a GUI? Why does it have to done from the command line? I could also ask why I have to do this at all, since I did not have to do it for Dapper Dan (Version D). Of course, Dapper Dan had a whole set of other problems. So on balance, this was a minor difficulty.

Oh well, at least I have dots.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture.