I’ve been using Ubuntu 7.10 on a Latitude D505 for a while now, and I’ve always been disappointed with the screen resolution. The max I could get was 1280x1024, while the native resolution is 1400x1050.
I recently had to reconfigure X on this machine (dpkg-reconfigure
xserver-xorg) and chose the intel driver (recommended by the
configure script). However, it turns out that this driver hangs the
machine when you close the lid. The older driver i810 works in this
regard, but the max resolution is too low.
The solution is to use the 915resolution application. This does some weird hacking of the video BIOS to allow Linux to use the full resolution.
Using it in Ubuntu is a breeze. Simply install the .deb package and
reboot.