9.10 does not detect display

[geoffDeGeoffGeoff]

I have 3 apparently identical HP machines and monitors.

I have installed Ubuntu 9.10 on two of them with no problems.

On the third machine I have installed on the screen resolution is very big. Looking at System > Preferences > Display I only get 800 x 600 and 640 x 480 as options. 'Detect Display' doesn't do anything.

On the other 2 machines Preferences > Display shows "Hewlett Packard 17" and has 1440 x 900 (16:10) selected as the resolution. This is correct and looks great.

I tried swapping the monitors and re-installing Ubuntu on the dodgy pc but it made no difference.

What can I do to fix this problem as this pc is almost unusable at this resolution? I googled but a lot of the fixes were for pre-9.10 releases and involved xorg.conf which doesn't appear to be there any more.

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.

[geoffDeGeoffGeoff]

so I found this http://www.linuxreaders.com/2009/11/04/change-ubuntu-9-10-resolution/ and it helped. I have the correct resolution now. It is not quite as good as on the machines where the monitor was detected - for example in Firefox at the moment the window looks like it goes off the screen to the left a tiny bit ie half the F of File in the top menu is obscured. It is an improvement though.

[Mark Phelps]

Glad you got some of it working, but there must be some differences between the machines to account for this.

Do an "lspci" in all three machines and make note of the video adapter. It must be different on the third machine.

It's not uncommon for OEMs to change internal hardware but not change the model number of the machine.