Well the time came when my good friend Richard asked for some help with his new monitor/graphics card setup.

Ubuntu had thrown him into low graphics mode. No good for his new 22″ LCD and also no good without 3D acceleration.

This fix takes about 20 seconds but will basically remove X11 from your Ubuntu install, purge the files and reinstall it so you can setup X11 exactly as it does in the installation of Ubuntu.

So what do you need to do?

1. Get to the system console (no good in a terminal from the Ubuntu desktop – it must be a command line log in).

2. Log in using your username and password

3. Issue the following at the command prompt:

sudo apt-get remove –purge xserver-xorg

4. Reboot the computer using the following:

sudo reboot

5. Log in once again. Then issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg

6. Then issue the following command (don’t worry it looks like it’s done nothing):

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

7. Then finally issue the command to reboot your computer again:

sudo reboot

And all should be well again, you may need to edit your preferences under System –>Preferences –> Display to choose the correct resolution but it will enable you to work from a fresh install of X11 and hopefully cure any problems.