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Date:      Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:56:08 +0200
From:      Andriy Gapon <avg@icyb.net.ua>
To:        freebsd-x11@freebsd.org
Subject:   xorg.conf: to hardcode or not
Message-ID:  <499035F8.50907@icyb.net.ua>

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This is not something FreeBSD-specific, but I decided to chat with the
fellows first.

For the past several years I've been a big fan of minimalistic
xorg.conf. Everything that X could auto-detect I left out of xorg.conf.
Works great most of the time.
But there are some edge cases.
If X gets restarted (e.g. a machine gets reboot) when a monitor is
switched off, then X can not possibly guess anything about it. And it
doesn't have smarts/options to re-use anything auto-detected on a
previous start. So it uses some (supposedly safe) fallback mode.

When this can be bad:
1. when you use x11vnc from a remote place;
2. when X auto-detection goes too crazy without a monitor;

I believe that I had 2 happening on me this morning.
My machine was restarted while I was away and a monitor was switched
off. When I came back and turned on the monitor I was greeted with
1024x768 resolution instead of usual 1680x1050 and, what is much worse,
with "bad" text consoles. When I switched to VT1-VT8 the monitor would
just go power-saving mode. Restarting X server helped it, but text
consoles remained the same. Reboot helped (of course).

So I am now thinking about reverting to hard-coding monitor parameters
in xorg.conf. OTOH, I am not 100% user that that would really prevent
too much auto-guessing.

-- 
Andriy Gapon



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