Comment 30 for bug 240916

I had forgotten about this yet another thing Ubuntu refuses to even provide a workaround much less fix.

Some quick notes - yes I want this fixed too (actually I've abandoned Ubuntu - they will ruin notifications, but not put a refresh in the network manager which is similarly broken, nor fix it - more of the "automatic is broken but we won't give you a manual option theory).

First, it isn't just monitors. My original problem was a laptop with a VIA chipset. The original driver had a few problems (mainly wiht 3d), but was usable (E-F). G or H broke it and removed the manual configuration. The VIA driver locked up constantly (no, they never fixed that), but I could use the default minimal VESA, but it was 800x600 although the bios and everything else said the screen was 1024x768. But now there was no way to tell X even to use a plain VESA mode of 1024x768 with what amounted to standard VESA monitor timings. There is no detection involved.

Worse, it wasn't just removed from the distribution disk, it was removed from the repositories. If I wanted it, I would have to track down the old source and recompile from scratch.

It isn't a big, complex job looking into strange driver code and hardware, it is just putting back one tiny freaking program into the repositories if not the main distro.

Right now I can't tell it that my monitor is a plain, vanilla, standard VESA with resolution of 1024x768.

VESA is not some complex or quirky hardware, it is a freaking standard! And Ubuntu doesn't support it.

It isn't a high priority because their policy seems never to fix severely broken automatic configuration - either setup like this or ongoing like network-manager (they have time for vanity UI changes though), but at the same time rip out all the manual configuration so if your hardware is affected there is no way for you to fix it.

I'm in the process of switching to Fedora (13) - it seems to be more stable, and although not everything is fixed, it has a large package library and so far they seem to be more friendly to older hardware.