[NTLUG:Discuss] Video Help Needed

[George Lass]

I have a 4 year old Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop with a slightly broken nVidia GeForce Go 7900 GS video card. By slightly broken I mean that if I try to use the "standard" nVidia driver that comes with Ubuntu (10.04) it won't display anything.  However if I boot in failsafe mode (which uses the frame buffer driver for Xwindows) the display works OK.  There are 2 things that I can't do with the frame buffer driver that I would like to be able to do though:

1) change the screen resolution
2) use the vga output to a second monitor


If anyone knows how to do this using the fb driver please let me know.  I have tried the obvious things like setting up multiple Screen/Monitor/Device sections and Display Modes in xorg.conf, but this doesn't seem to work.  The fb driver crashes the second time it is loaded, and even when only one Screen is defined, it complains that the all Modes but the probed virtual mode are invalid due to "test failed".


Thanks,

George