f10 install - low screen resolution

[Mike Wright]

Hi all,

I've decided it was time to drink the KoolAid so I downloaded the "f10
Live CD", burned a bootable image, and hit reset.  All in all pretty 
impressive.

However, the screen resolution defaulted to 800x600, useless on a 22" 
lcd display.  In f->system->preferences->hardware->screen_resolution 
there was only one selection available: 800x600.  Aaargh!  As a 
work-around I copied over an xorg.conf file from another machine, did 
the old init 3; init 5 routine and suddenly had a high resolution display.

What I don't understand is that this display adapter has worked
beautifully in fc4, fc6, and fc8 installations.

lspci reveals the card to be an nVidia Corporation NV5M64 [RIVA TNT2
Model 64/Model 64 Pro] (rev 15) (I know: nVidia = proprietary) but this
card is ancient and has been well supported for many, many years.

Now, a neophyte trying out this release would have no idea about
xorg.conf and would certainly not have a copy of it laying around.  How
would they be able to handle this?

Below is the relevant section from xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "Videocard0"
	Driver      "nv"
	VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
	BoardName   "RIVA TNT2"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "Screen0"
	Device     "Videocard0"
	Monitor    "Monitor0"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
		Modes    "1680x1050" "1400x1050" "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1280x800" 
"1152x864" "1024x768"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

The below are the resolutions offered after I added the above xorg.conf.

1600x1200
1400x1050
1280x1024
1280x960
1152x864
1024x768
...
320x240

There is absolutely NO correlation between the two that I can ascertain.

Also, 1600x1200 is squeezed into the 1680x1050 area resulting in ovals 
instead of circles and squashed fonts.

Anybody have any advice on how to get decent settings?  When there was 
an option for Display settings this was fixable, but now we don't even 
have that choice.  Smells an awful lot like a regression.

Anybody remember waaaay back to the RedHat 4 boxed distro with a dead 
tree manual included?  If you wanted to you use it you had to spring for 
a Matrox video card to the tune of half a grand.  I never did get to use 
it.  Had to wait for 5.2. :(

Thanks for any help,
Mike Wright