UNIX Desktop Questions & Answers

I installed gnome on my solaris 8 box. The first time I ran Gnome It told me to change the resolution. I accidentally closed the window and didn't get a chance to copy the command. What is the command or how do I change the desktop resolution?

To change the resolution, configuration for this is controlled by a binary, which varies depending on which video card you have (state your video card and the memory size), and, of course, what sort of resolutions your monitor can support.

To find out what kind of video card you have installed on your system run the following command from a terminal:

shell /usr/sbin/fbconfig -list

Then check the official installation guide, to determine which command you should run. For my Sun Ultra 5 and my ViewSonic P815, i ran m64config -res 1152x900 -depth 24 and it worked fine. However, i noticed some people having problems. Please note that the video changes will not take effect untill you log out of your current window manager and log in again. You do not need to reboot. Don't worry about giving a command that is out of range for your VIDEO card. It will simply return an error if that mode is not supported. However if your MONITOR does not support that resolution you could be in trouble. Also note that there is no 16bit or 32bit color depth. There are only 8bit and 24bit