Can we have this as a canonical "answer"?

Question

There seems to be a number of questions about screen resolutions not being detected by the default open source drivers. Try searching AU for "Undetected Screen Resolution" and you will be able to see them.Here are a few examples:-

• How to increase the default screen resolution without a monitor plugged in

• Low Resolution on Boot, not Login

• Resolution resets after every reboot, Screen Resoultion stuck at 1024x768

• Need to change the resolution options

• Resolution HD 1920x1280 with Intel graphics in ubuntu 12.04 LTS

  Therefore I think this answer here may be a canonical "answer" for those type of questions. But does the community think so?

Answer 1

The problem with having a canonical answer with that kind of problem is that there are way too many variables to take into account. It's Intel, Nvidia, ATI or something else? Do you use open or closed drivers? What version? Version of Xorg? What modules load? Do the modules fail to load? Large etc.

You can't have a canonical answer based solely in 1 symptom, but in several quite common ones. There could be million plus one reasons why the resolution is bad, and each of those reasons deserves their own question/answer.

Note: there are a multitude of "canonical questions" that are super-mega-dumps of lot of information that may or may not work in your case, I'm totally against them and in fact I got one of my questions reopened on SO and here on AU because the specifics of my question didn't get solved with the current answers on the canonical question, the nature of the question itself is radically different and the solution proposed wouldn't work if you didn't had exactly the same problem.