X server problem with T61-nivida quadro nvs 140m

While using the Nvidia settings program I cannot get the program to safe configurations(resolution changes or dual monitors). It says that I need to save my configuration and restart the x server, but I can never safe the configuration. It always says it was unable to delete the backup file. I am running ubuntu.

 

Are you running the nVidia configuration program as root? (i.e., run with sudo)?

Or, if that doesn't work, try deleting (or backing up... again) the backup file, which is likely to be something like /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup or something similar. Just make sure not to delete /etc/X11/xorg.conf itself!

EDIT: if that STILL doesn't work, you can always read documentation (to know what options to put in) and edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file yourself. Just make sure you make a backup of the old configuration, and know how to restore the backup through the terminal if something goes wrong. If you can't already do this, these are good skills to have, so I would recommend trying it out. I'm sure that all the nVidia configuration app is doing is editing this file anyway, it just gives you a nice pretty frontend to do it with.

 

how do I run it with sudo? I know about sudo( a little) but do not know how to run the program with it.

 

Whoa, okay, well, first to answer your question... open up a terminal, and type in "sudo program_name". THAT'S IT. (Well, there are more advanced uses for sudo if you want to configure it that way... but we won't get into that here). If you didn't know, basically that let's you run said program with root privileges (equivalent of an administrator in Windows).

With that said, I recommend you search out and maybe read a couple beginner's guides to Ubuntu or something. Quite frankly, using sudo is one of the first things you should learn to do if you need to administrate an Ubuntu machine. Remember, Linux isn't Windows, so don't expect to do things the same way. GUI tools are nice, but, at least in its current form, you can't completely avoid the terminal in Linux. So it's better to learn to deal with it (I actually prefer it, but that may be just me).

 

thanks for the explaination. I just started using linunx but plan on reading many beginners guides and learning all aspects of linux.