Dell Inspiron 8000 Success But ...

[chaotos]

Hi. I am new to the forums. I have an old Dell Inspiron 8000 and decided to try installing Ubuntu 8.10 on it. I now have a nice 1200 x 1600 Ubuntu desktop in front of me (Dell only made this high resolution screen briefly; idiots complained that the icons were too small).

This is the video card reported by lspci:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility M4 AGP

At first I was stuck with a tiny screen but I found this post:

http://liltux.wordpress.com/2007/12/28/installing-ubuntu-on-dell-inspiron-8000-laptop/

Following these instructions I added these lines to the monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

HorizSync 31-82
VertRefresh 40-110

Bingo! On the second reboot (???) I get a nice full screen and can select 1200 x 1600 for screen resolution.

This post also suggests:

"I also changed the color depth from 24bits to 16 bits and inserted the following lines under the device section.

Option “AGPMode” “4″
Option “AGPSize” “32″
Option “EnablePageFlip” “true”
Option “Display” “BIOS”
Option “SWCursor” “true”
Option “CCEusecTimeout” “20000″ "

So I went ahead and added them.

I am unclear about the color depth thing. Where is this set or do the above lines do this somehow?

Wayne
Boulder, Colorado