Okay so today I turn on my pc and my monitor is stuck at 640x480, I attempt to change the display settings but it wont let me change any of the options. I tried to switch to a different Nvidia driver (open source and proprietary) to no avail, tried switching back to the Nouveau driver too, still no luck. Not sure what caused this, but I think its happened due to something that updated, I remember when I was last on my pc letting it do some updates. How can I diagnose this and fix it?
Am on Xbuntu Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS Release: 18.04 Codename: bionic
25 Answers
This worked for me:
- Search Nvidia packages
$ dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia - Remove all the Nvidia drivers
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*' - Go to: Software Updates⇢Additional Drivers⇢select first one⇢Apply Changes⇢reboot
This looks like nomodeset.
Make sure that it isn't set somwhere in your ubuntu configuration
grep nomodeset /etc/ -rs
This should print by default only:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_RECOVERY="$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_RECOVERY nomodeset"
If it appears somwhere else, i.e. in /etc/default/grub - remove it and update grub configuration with
sudo update-grub2
Then reboot.
Also check which graphics driver is in use.
lspci -v
Look for your graphics card or VGA string sections.
In case it's
Kernel driver in use: nouveau
open applications menu and go to Updates -> Settings -> Additional Drivers
or via terminal:
/usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/software-properties-gtk --open-tab 4
and install one of proprietary drivers available.
Keep in mind that after switching drivers you need to reboot your PC.
1I had the same problem this past week when I was reviving an older PC. No matter what Linux distro I installed, I was stuck at 640x480 resolution. I tried different video cards, proprietary BIOS settings,etc. I had an older version of OpenSUSE 12.3 (Dartmouth) installed on another partition and it worked fine with all resolutions. I tried installing a fresh version of OpenSUSE 12.3 and it also worked with all resolutions. All of the recent Linux distros I tried required me to use ACPI=off to boot. This avoided black screen, freezes, etc. but the resolution was stuck at 640x480
At this point, I decided it had something to do with the kernel, or drivers, or boot options. I tried every common kernel option list in this link, and found that using nolapic option was the solution. This worked with every distro that previously failed and all my resolutions work.
I got the same issue. I looked on different forum, without any success. And I finally found I had a low latency kernel installed since my last update. I checked before uninstalling it that I had another kerneil installed, which was ok, so I decided to uninstall this low latency kernel, and now everything is working fine.
I am running Xubuntu 20.04 LTS. My current linux image version is 5.4.0-72.80, and I had a low latency kernel 5.8.0-x
Tried answer from @Bhaskar S but that doesn't work for me. I tried to go to GRUB menu and pick a different kernel option and the full resolution is then back.
