[Cialug] fix resolution and refresh on Xubuntu

[Tim Champion]

I'm running Xubuntu on an old HP Omnibook - 1ghz p3 & 128MB or RAM. Last
time I did a distribution upgrade to 9.10, it screwed up my screen
resolution (only can get 800x600 on an LCD that only likes 1024x768), and in
the course of tryig to fix it, I made it worse so now even the external
monitor can't handle the refresh rate I set it to (don't know what it was)

To further my troubles, this thing won't boot from USB (yes, I updated the
BOIS to the newest version), and the optical drive is pretty much dead.  I
have a pxe server that I've been trying to get it to boot from, but I'm not
having much luck there.

What I CAN do is get to the recover console/menu with network/internet
access. I tried the option for "repair broken packages" - didn't seem to do
anything except go update my packages, which did nothting. can get to a
command prompt from here, but I can't find any way to configure x outside of
xwindows.  Most of the stuff I'm finding from google tells me to do a
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. I type that, and it just brings me back to
another prompt with no errors.

I want to know how to do is go through some kind of screen
resolution/refresh wizard that will let me fix my settings.

Also, I tried editing the xorg.conf manually, but most of the stuff is
commented out saying:
Commented out by update-manager, HAL is used now.

and I don't see any screen resolutions listed there like I'm used to
seeing.  Who wants to try and help?

Tim Champion
timchampion at gmail.com
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