Linux Format forums

Marrea · Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 9:57 pm Post subject: Xorg - the arguments drag on

I thought I would install Debian 5 (from LXFDVD118) on my old Satellite Pentium III laptop today, and very nice it is too. Unfortunately when I booted into my new system, the resolution had been set to 800x600 when what I wanted was 1024x768. Annoyingly, System > Preferences > Screen Resolution had two options only, 800x600 and 640x480. However, after some tweaking of the automatically configured xorg.conf, I managed to obtain the required 1024x768 and all is well with the world.

In connection with this, I was amused to come across the slightly ill-tempered discussion at http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=37194 from which it appears I am not the only one frustrated by this supposed improvement. Wink

roseway · LXF regular Joined: Thu Jan 18, 2007 2:27 pm Posts: 402

You're certainly not the only one. This is a recurring theme in the Debian user forums. Most of the time, automatic configuration works and all is fine, but when it doesn't work, and the user is a newbie, it causes great frustration.
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Eric

Marrea

paulm

At the moment, Zenwalk current is nice and stable, but the same cannot be said for the snaphot repos.

I've lost the ability to scroll with the touchpad on my laptop, and ended up with similar problems regarding starting X.

A lot of it seems to be down to Netpkg/Xnetpkg playing silly games with deps. For the moment at least, you are much better off using Zendo/ZPM for updates.

Smile

Its also a good idea to avoid the snapshot repos just after a release - they tend to be broken for a while....

paul

Rhakios

nelz

It's not easy and hard, it's different types of easy. To a new desktop user, a nice pointy-clicky GUI is easy. To an experienced sysadmin looking after 100 machines spread through four buildings, it would be a nightmare, whereas a shell one-liner, piping several arcane looking text processing commands, would be the easy way to update or reconfigure them all.
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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are.

Marrea

Marrea

Marrea

towy71

Rhakios

The day all distros become easy for novices to install and update, someone will release ABL (Awkward B4stard Linux) just to make sure that not all distros are easy to use.
It might even be me. Very Happy

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Bye, Rhakios

nelz

What's this X thing you refer to? Very Happy

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Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who it's friends are.

Marrea

ollie

jjmac

Marrea wrote:
>>
In connection with this, I was amused to come across the slightly ill-tempered discussion
>>

Yes, deb sites can be just as <um> interesting </um> as any other.

And it is a good example of the folly of automation. It reminds me of a tv episode i saw once, can't remember the program, it might have been the Bill. But this bloke walks into an apartment that is fully automated (grin). A few floors up. He then found, after closing the door, that he couldn't get out. Couldn't open a window, could get the fridge to open (hehehe) (total_snigger.png). It was a couple of days later until he was found and the apartment was slightly damaged by that time.

No xorg.config --- outrageous on the part of X. Easily solved with a saved xorg.config. No saved config ... outrageous on the part of the user.

A mode line can be extracted from /var/log/Xorg.0.log with the appropriate part pasted in ... if needed, as such, it appears i didn't need to ...