Admitedly, I acted fairly stupidly when I tried to upgrade my linux computer. I assumed it was much like Windows, and really you only had to google search the drivers (why I didn't do this first I'll never know), swap the card, delete old drivers and install new ones. It didn't work... First I'm upgrading to an ancient card (less ancient than the 10(?) year old card currently in there), an e-Geforce4 MX4000, and for the life of me I can't find the drivers. The current card I have is so old I don't even know the name of it - literrally it was an old spare part from my garage. Anyway, like a dolt I just swapped the cards, and GNOME couldn't display itself. To get the right drivers, I swapped back to the (more) ancient card, and here I am now with one minor complication... My resolution is and cannot be changed from a horrible 640x480, and I have no idea where to go from here. I've google searched the issue, but either the posts are much too technical (I'm a complete Linux Novice) or unrelated (for instance, apparently this issue can come about in various, non-hardware related ways). Can anyone help me upgrade to the new the card, or at the very least fix my resolution? I would appreciate any assistance, or even advice. Thanks for reading, and thanks for any replies.

To take the quick way out: try to reconfigure your Xserver automagically. To have dpkg do this, run "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" (if using Xorg) or "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" (if using XFree86) as root. If that doesn't do the trick, here's the manual method:

Virtually all X Window System configuration will take place in one file. Depending upon the implementation, that file is generally located at /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/X11/XF86Config, or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4. You will need to edit this file as the owner (generally root).

If you cannot edit this file from inside a GUI editor, install a terminal editor such as nano (less frightening than emacs or vim to most people). I assume you know how to become root and install such a program, yes?

To get the new card running with the open drivers ("nv" for a NVidia card), you should edit the X configuration file. There will be a "Device" section describing your card and the driver to utilize. Replace whatever is quoted on the "Driver" line with "nv". (NVidia does supply a proprietary but superior driver that I can detail how to install and configure at a later point.)

Available resolutions are selected in the "Screen" section. There will be a subsection for each of the allowed bitdepths, each with a Modes line. Each quoted resolution on those lines (in the "widthxheight" format) is allowed. If I recall correctly, the first entry on the mode line in the default depth's subsection is the default resolution.

After making changes, you generally restart the login manager in Debian to restart X. So, in my case: "/etc/init.d/gdm restart" at the command line would do the trick (replace gdm with kdm or xdm if that is what you have installed).

Errors from X server initialization are stored in /var/log in Xorg.0.log or something similar for XFree86. Let us know how it goes.

While I appreciate the input, this did absolutely nothing to solve the issue. I am still locked in at 640x480... I can't even see the whole of this textbox, over 90% of it is offscreen. What joy...

Edit: Tried it again and this time it worked. Thanks, now I can actually read the text onscreen. I'll update the drivers for the new video card shortly after using this method - here's hoping it works. Thanks again.