2008-04-15

Goodbye xorg.conf!

After reading this article on xrandr, I wanted to see how total autoconfiguration works on X Windows.

As a start, I tried removing xorg.conf file completely and restart X. The sky didn't fall down! In fact, I didn't notice any change. Everything from USB hotplug to OpenGL continued to work as before.

The only tweak needed was to the old font system. Unlike fontconfig, the old X font system seems to depend on the "font path" set in xorg.conf. This was a problem for using my custom SUN22x12 font in xterm. After adding the following lines to ~/.fvwm/preferences/Startup, this problem was gone, too.

AddToFunc InitFunction
+ I Exec exec /usr/bin/xset +fp /usr/local/share/fonts

Yes, I use fvwm-crystal, a "polished" version of FVWM. Old school, so what?

1 comment:

geekaholic said...

Unfortunately some of us can't totally say good bye to it :). I found some issues when using composite extensions for instance. Also to use synaptic touch pads fully as found on Notebooks you still need the entries in xorg. I think eventually these issues will be sorted out but in the mine time I wish they'd make our custom xorg.conf an override of settings as opposed to the whole file. At the moment if you decided to use xorg you still need a fair amount of settings or X wont start.

I did a post on xrandr and getting 2 monitors to work a while back http://www.geekaholic.org/2007/09/hotplugging-secondary-display-on-linux.html