Ubuntu: NVidia Drivers

UBUNTU FANGIRL ALERT:

I’ve been having problems changing my screen resolution on Ubuntu because I’m using a NVidia card. It’s been a pain to try and save my settings as each time I do, the error message, “Unable to remove old X config backup file ‘/etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup” keeps coming up.

Community documentation from the Ubuntu website helped me solve one part of the problem. Basically you enter the command from the site into Terminal as root, aka the super administrator of the computer, and then copy paste the current settings into the old file. This allows you to override the backup file. (Note: Once you are logged into the terminal as root, you can pretty much do anything).

However, upon restarting the screen reverted back to my previous setting, which was 1024 x 768, instead of 1280 x 1024. I was about to give up and just live with it at this point when I decided to run through the rest of the forum links I’d opened before I restarted my save session (Firefox’s reload tabs from last session is love!!).

It turns out that after saving the xorg.conf file, I needed to change my default settings for my screen resolution too. This was done by heading into the top panel and clicking on Systems > Preferences > Screen Resolution. Once I was there, I changed my screen resolution, set it to default, and restarted the PC.

It worked. 😀 I’ve been logging into my Ubuntu for the past two days and both times the resolution was as what I wanted. It was a bit disorienting to not having to change the desktop resolution manually, but I can live with that. 😀