Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 25th Jun 2007 20:36 UTC, submitted by Techie
"Let's face it; some distributions have better controls for handling display issues than others. Two that do it right out of the box that come to mind include Fedora (Red Hat) and openSUSE (Novell). Each includes tools that minimize the need to do what I gleefully refer to as the 'Xorg dance'. Basically, these options mean you are going to be spending more time exploring what these distros have to offer, yet less time wondering why your resolution looks completely off. Unfortunately, even with the latest release of Ubuntu, we have yet to see this level of functionality."
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Member since:2005-09-28
"The main problem with Sax2, however, is that it makes it hard to hack you xorg.conf file. As good as Sax2 is, sometimes it just isn't enough and you need to hack away at xorg.conf yourself. But in order to keep xorg.conf stable and readable by Sax2, Sax2 generates it on boot, so you can never hack it."
?? I can do whatever I like with xorg.conf and it doesn't get overwritten by sax2.
Even when i run sax2 to change some setting it will only change that one setting and leave everything else I changed in xorg.conf alone.
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Member since:
2007-01-18
Sax2 is certainly by far the best tool for dealing with system configuration that I've ever seen. None of the other distributions have picked it up probably because every distribution appears to want to do that sort of thing themselves, which does increase variety, but it can also mean that progress isn't always shared everywhere.
The main problem with Sax2, however, is that it makes it hard to hack you xorg.conf file. As good as Sax2 is, sometimes it just isn't enough and you need to hack away at xorg.conf yourself. But in order to keep xorg.conf stable and readable by Sax2, Sax2 generates it on boot, so you can never hack it.
I think that it may be possible to make hack-like changes through Sax2, but I've never really tried to figure out how. It was too much work and my need wasn't great enough.
Fedora 7 already includes most of these, and *will* work without an xorg.conf, probing your system and selecting settings at run-time.[2]
Now this is what we _really_ need. I'd _love_ to have my system dynamically and correctly determine the display settings. However, my main concerns would be:
1) There are times when it's necessary to force the computer into a certain resolution and/or certain number of colors in order to get some older programs to work and dynamic setting selection won't do that. You'll need to be able to alter the settings yourself.
2) What about things like mice? We're still going to need a way to tell the computer what to do with the various buttons on a mouse. For a simple mouse, it's not an issue, but for a more complex one, it might be.
Of course, there will probably be (if there aren't already) solutions to both of those two problems. Overall, I'll be _very_ excited to see a dynamic solution to Xorg configuration. It's been far too much of an achilles heal for Linux for too long.