[ale] Xorg rant

[Christoper Fowler]

I think this email may be a copy of one I sent last year.

I decided today to install gOS on an Aopen Xcube and try it out.  It
has a Nvidia chip.

When it finished I had a nice 20" widescreen LCD at 800x600!.  I
installed the drivers from the GUI and now it was down to 640x480!
To fix this I copied xorg.conf from my shuttleX to this machine and
finally I get 1680x1050.

Last year when I did this install on my shuttleX I had to install
Ubuntu 7.10 first so that xorg.conf was correct.  I then had to
to do the 8.04 update.  If I installed 8.04 first then xorg.conf was
broken.  Apparently there is a movement in X to have the driver
detect resolution at start instead of details in xorg.conf.  IMO, this
is truly broken.  Especially with older hardware.

It takes someone like me to fix this on my system.  What about people
installing gOS that have not had any exposure at all
with Linux.  Good Luck.  Is this truly progress and I'm just doing
things wrong? 

Another question.  at 1680x1050 my fonts are a bit fuzzy.   The
Xcube as a chip with 32M mem dedicated.  The shuttleX has an
AGP card with 128m real memory.  On shuttleX the fonts are crisp
and everything is bright.  on gOS it is dull and fuzzy.  Possibly refresh
rate is wrong or maybe I need to make a change in the preferences?

Chris