This turned out to be related to Bug #1493888. I use fglrx
as my graphics driver, and according to the offical Changelog for Wily Werewolf, that is not compatible at this time.
There are workarounds in the comments of the bug on Launchpad, but it did not work for me personally. I will be downgrading for the time being.
UPDATE: I'm now working just fine on Ubuntu 15.10. Apparently, fglrx
will not be supported in Ubuntu 16.04, so moving away from that proprietary driver is ideal if at all possible.
WARNING: Before you start in on all this jazz, make sure your graphics card actually is supported by xserver-xorg-video-ati
. To
find your graphics card model, run...
$ lspci -nn | grep VGA
Your model is towards the end of the line. Then, check the list on
the official Ubuntu wiki for your model. You may need to ignore
the letter at the end of the model; mine was a Radeon HD 6520G
, but
I had to search the page for only 6520
.
The lack of screen resolution options on the open source xserver-xorg-video-ati
driver stems from the fact that, if fglrx
is present on the system at all, it will massively interfere with xserver-xorg-video-ati
.
If anyone else hits this problem, you can purge fglrx from TTY or recovery mode root. Then, reinstall the open-source drivers.
$ sudo apt-get remove --purge xorg-driver-fglrx fglrx*
$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver xorg-core
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
Reboot your computer, and you'll find that the problem has resolved.