I'm testing some old school arcade games, available from Debian's package repositories and quitting one of the games ended me up with a GNOME Screen Resolution of 640×480 pixels.
I wanted to revert back to the Classics resolution, so what I would normally do to do that is use >GNOME menus:
System -> Preferences -> Monitors
In that huge screen resolution on my 14 inch lenovo notebook screen, however the System menu cannot fit in 640×480 resolution. You can see the non-screen fitting System on the screenshot below:
Having this situation, I needed a way to change back to my normal daily used 1024x768px screen resolution to continue my daily work by some other way.
One possible solution I thought of was Logging Off Gnome and logging again. Loggig off and log on again would usually restart the initiated GNOME session and therefore will reset the screen resolution to my default 1024×768 / 32 bit color.
Having the unobservable System gnome panel menu on my screen however made using the usual Log off procedure via System -> Log Out myusername impossible…
Another possible way to actually restart my screen and hence revert back to my original resolution is achiavable using the classical restart X server key switch CTRL + ALT + backspace (bckspc) . Though this was a possible approach to the situation, I had a bunch of programs already running on my desktop and I did not wanted to interrupt my desktop session, what I was looking for is simply change the screen resolution size .
With all said I had to look up for alternative way (preferably easy) way, to revert back my screen resolution to my desired 1024×768.
As a console guy, I was interested if there is some kind of possibility to change my GNOME resolution directly using xterm or gnome-terminal , after a bit of check up online, I've found few threads started by people who were looking just like me for a way to change GNOME / KDE screen resolution size on various distributions Linux desktops as well on Free/Net/Open/BSDs. The answer to the question on few places was the command xrandr which I had used some few years ago to initiate remote X server connections via SSH
xrandr is actually a great tool part of the x11-xserver-utils
Actually xrandr is capable of doing a few things besides setting the screen resolution size, just to name a few it supports change the screen orientation, reflection of the output of the screen, adjust brightness, set color gamma etc. etc.
It is good to mention that xrandr changes the resolution not on a GNOME level but on Xorg server level.
Using xrandr to change the screen resolution appeared to be very easy.
1. First I issued xrandr to check all the supported xrandr resolutions by my X server
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ xrandr Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 8192 x 8192VGA1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)LVDS1 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 304mm x 228mm 1024x768 60.0*+ 50.0 800x600 60.3 56.2 640x480 60.0 59.9 TV1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)hipo@noah:~/Desktop$
From the output you can see I have 3 basic resolutions configured in my Xorg, I can switch between.
2. To switch to my previous default screen resolution
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ xrandr -s 1024x768
After using xrandr command to revert back to my default screen size, I realized there is two other (partially command line partially gui) way to change to 1024×768 pixels.3. Through launching gnome Control Center and searching for Monitors menu.
If one prefers this way he can;
i) press ALT+F2 to invoke Gnome's Run Application dialog
ii) issue gnome-control-center command:
4. By invoking gnome's Control Panel -> Monitors settings window by a command
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ gnome-display-properties
How to enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace in Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) Linux
Monday, January 16th, 2012My sister, experience some programs running with wine (Windows Emulator) to crash on her Ubuntu 11.10.
As she is quite new with Linux, she has no idea about the existence of CTRL ALT BACKSPACE key combination to restart a hanged GNOME, KDE by directly killing the Xorg server.
I felt obliged to explain her it is better to use CTRL ALT BACKSPACE X kill switch instead of restarting the whole Linux kernel (which basiclly is working) and that it is just the display keeping blacnk.
Pressing the would kill Xorg and therefore all applicatins previously running on top of it will die. In Ubuntu Xorg is configured to run via gdm, so once killed it will automatically reload the GDM (Gnome Display Manager).
I was about to explain her that its better she use CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE instead of restarting the whole system but suddenly I realized this is not working.
In UBUNTU 11.10 and I guess in all UBUNTU's after 9.04 CTRL ALT BACKSPACE is substituted with the key switch combination ALT PRINTSCREEN K, I've explained her about that.
This change is actually a change implied by most Linux distributions nowdas and is some kind of change in Xorg newer versions…
To enable back the CTRL + ALT + BACKSPACE , I've issued cmd:
stanimira@ubuntu~:$ echo' setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp' >> ~/.xinitrc
An alternative way to set setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp to run on Ubuntu user login is by setting it as a startup application using;
stanimira@ubuntu:~$ gnome-session-properties
Press the Add button and type in the box to appear;
Name: setxkbmap
Command: setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
Comment: setxkbmap
Reverting the Xserver kill switch back to the classical Ctrl+Alt+Backspace should also be running fine on older Ubuntu Linuces – 11.04, 10.10, 10.04 etc.
Tags: add button, Alt, Auto, backspace, Button, change, Comment, Ctrl, Display, Draft, existence, GDM, Gnome, kde, key switch, kill, kill switch, Linux, linux kernel, login, most linux distributions, ocelot, option, Press, printscreen, Reverting, session properties, setxkbmapCommand, startup, startup application, switch combination, type, Ubuntu, wine, wine windows, xinitrcAn, Xorg, xserver
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