Display Troubles

For clarity, the "Display" in "Display Troubles" refers to any hard- and software directly involved in putting an image in people's heads a certain number of times per second (so not just the monitor).

Configuring displays is tricky business. Mostly because, if you do end up with a bad configuration, you can't see what you're doing anymore. That makes it hard to fix anything. X Windows and Gnome have always been bits of my GNU/Linux system that I just left alone. I don't mess with them, and they (mostly) don't bother me. Actually, they've served me very well for years without the slightest attention from me.

Recently, however, I discovered that huge external monitors are ridiculously low-priced compared to the puny screen on even a very chunky laptop. I got me one, and without bothering to look up the pretty fantastic Ubuntu/Nvidia documentation, I stumbled my way through setting up my system to use it. Everything was quite fine for a while, as long as I didn't reboot. For some reason, when I rebooted, part of the display configuration was lost, leading to seemingly random results. It worked well enough often enough after a couple of reboots and some random settings-fiddling.

For a while this was acceptable. Ubuntu is quite content to be put into hibernation mode, I can go months without a reboot. (Compare this to my significant other, who get's funny behaviour from her OS if she doesn't reboot for more than a couple of days).

Then my kernel image was updated, and hibernation was no longer an option. OK, I figured, reboot and spent another couple of minutes unknowledgeably poking the display settings like I had done a couple of times, hoping I could sort of get it to work and get back to what I really wanted to get done that evening.

Nope. This time, my display configuration was so badly messed up that I couldn't just ignore it. My desktop looked pretty much as usual, except it was frozen. So how do you browse the web for a solution from there?

I figured it was time to find out just how hard it could be to setup my display properly, and it turned out to be quite easy, and very interesting!