warn on LiveCD/installer startup about low screen resolution

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Won't this be superseded by the displayconfig-gtk work happening in gutsy?

(To the submitter: please disregard the previous comment - you don't need to write a specification for this.)

Check this out: https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/displayconfig-gtk

For the Install CD, 800x600 should be an adequate resolution to get through the installation. 640x480 may be insufficient, however requiring them to run displayconfig-gtk in this situation may not give a very clean usability. In this case it might be better to figure out what caused them to run in 640x480, since the problem may be something that displayconfig-gtk won't be able to fix either.

If a warning dialog is determined to be needed, that would probably be implemented easily as a short bash script using xdpyinfo to determine the resolution in use, and zenity for the warning. This could be run via the Live CD session user's .xinitrc. What do others think? I'd be happy to code up this script if it's desired.

For the Live CD, yes, displayconfig-gtk will be available to reconfigure the X resolution, and the user will be able to run it even in 640x480 mode to reconfigure things. I don't know that we necessarily need to present a warning pop up in this case; that could just be added clutter, but it might be a worthwhile usability trade-off. I'd like to wait and see how users respond to having displayconfig-gtk in the system menu for Gutsy, as that alone may be sufficient.

Just tried the latest release of Gutsy: 7.10 Release Candidate.
 I'm seeing the following on my Averatec 3200

Since the safe boot option no longer is a choice, I selected Start or Install....
After booting for a bit I think X attempts to start and the screen is blank but back-lit.
I waited a bit for this and finally gave up.

I rebooted and edited the boot line to add vga=771
Eventually (after 5 or more mins) the system X started and produced a warning error box
indicating it was in low-res mode because it could not detect my hardware and asking whether I would like to configure things manually.

I tried various of the options offered (rebooting between each and painstakingly waiting to get to the warning box). None of the following attempts succeeded

1) simply press continue at the warning box
2) Configure as 800x600 generic lcd at 60hz device driver vga
3) Configure as 1024x768 generic lcd at 60hz device driver vesa

All of these result in a blank backlit screen but no X windows or cursor displayed.

On giving this some consideration, I think it's not something we really want to do because there exist legitimate cases where the user does indeed want 640x480. As well, I personally think adding a popup in such cases is just papering over the real issue of why the resolution didn't get detected correctly, and I think energies should be directed towards fixing those problems.