Re: need help with xorg.conf

[Stephen Powell <zlinuxman@wowway.com>]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2010 00:13:38 -0500 (EST), Mark Allums wrote:
> I am asking such silly-seeming questions because xorg.conf these days 
> tends to be ignored by the Xservers if it seems inconvenient to the 
> driver+server.  That is, in my experience, if the monitor is 
> plug-and-play, then X goes by whatever the monitor hardware reports, and 
> xorg.conf might as well not exist.

I wouldn't say that the X server *ignores* xorg.conf.  But it is true that
configuration statements such as HorizSync and VertRefresh are ignored
in a monitor section if the monitor is plug-and-play.  The values reported
by the monitor are used instead.

I'm not sure I like that behavior.  One could argue that point either way,
I suppose.  On the one hand, one could argue that the monitor knows best,
and if it reports its characteristics via EDID, they should be used.
On the other hand, one may wish to override these values for the purpose
of experimentation.  Being an engineer, I want to be able to override
things for the purpose of experimentation.  But the designers of X are
probably more interested in preventing damage to the monitor.  Therefore,
they took the other approach.

In the solution to the problem at hand, I did not override any monitor
characteristics.  I simply told the driver to use a different (non-default)
algorithm for setting the video mode.

-- 
  .''`.     Stephen Powell    <zlinuxman@wowway.com>
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