[ale] Xorg rant

[Jim Philips]

Christoper Fowler wrote:
> 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?
>
>   
I am also not happy about the way pluggable devices are now configured
in X. You have to tinker with policy files in /etc/hal/fdi/policy.  Most
of what was in xorg.conf is gone. This means that getting your special
keyboard or mouse to work properly is a hit and miss process that is
very poorly documented. Before the new X, I used a program called btnx
to configure my mouse. That program no longer works under the new
structure and the developer is not continuing it. I don't mind tinkering
some. I've been using Linux since 1995. But hours of googling turned up
one configuration for my mouse, a Logitech Marble Mouse, and that
configuration doesn't work for me, for some reason. Command line stuff
is okay, but it shouldn't be this great a PITA just to configure a
stinking mouse, and a fairly primitive one at that.