Stuck at 640x480 resolution;

Question

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

Answer 1

This worked for me:

1. Search Nvidia packages

   $ dpkg -l | grep -i nvidia
   

2. Remove all the Nvidia drivers

   $ sudo apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*'
   

3. Go to: Software Updates⇢Additional Drivers⇢select first one⇢Apply Changes⇢reboot

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

I 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,https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions, and found that using nolapic option was the solution. This worked with every distro that previously failed and all my resolutions work.

Answer 4

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