At work we all have Dell systems, my 2 happen to be Optiplex GX270's.

I thought great, mainstream manufacturer so the default drivers set should cover it, how wrong I was, they happen to have the A03 BIOS and the Intel 865 chipset with the shared memory Extreme graphics card which is known as a royal pain in the arse under any unix system, the linux kernel struggles to retrieve the proper graphics memory size therefore limiting you to 640x480 resolution under any of the X GUI's (Gnome, KDE e.t.c.).

After much forum surfing and googling I managed to come across the perfect fix 865patch.deb
I am yet to be able to find the original author(s), according to various forums it originated from joepenguin.com which is now some dodgey search engine type holding page.

It took me a long time to find it and the site seems to have disapeered into thin air so I thought I would post it up for anyone struggling to get their Optiplex into a half reasonable resolution.

If anyone knows of the original author please let me know as I would like to thank them & credit them for this.