[Gllug] Monitor detection and screen modes in Debian Lenny

[David L Neil Mailing list a/c]

YMMV strikes again!

I should add that when I suffered this problem, Chris very kindly 
rendered hours of assistance; but when time kept passing and sleep 
intruded, I reneged and went for another distro...


- Tethys wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 12:20 PM, - Tethys <tethys at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have no idea what the "correct" way to do it is these days, but I've
>> always found "vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf" to work.

The real issue was with the 'automation'. Debian didn't seem to care if 
we edited the .conf or used a GUI/tool to do the same, if we set the 
resolution and put on a smiley face, it would throw our work away 
because at re-boot it knew better... (Ubuntu was the same)


> I should point out that in part, this is due to the uselessness of the
> GUI front ends I've used (be it on RH/Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu). They
> all seem to work for the simple cases, but for whatever reason, my
> systems never seem to fall into the simple category. The Red Hat

=in this case an Eizo or iiyama 17" monitor was the 'simple' bit, or 
perhaps the mbd-inclusive S3 graphics card wasn't playing ball?


> system-config-display utility used to work flawlessly before they made
> it work using D-Bus and HAL. Now it doesn't :-( So much for
> progress...

=actually that "make it work" was exactly my line to sum up the above* 
(sorry Chris!)

=I even tried SuSE 11.1 (the box was running SuSE 10.0 at the desired 
res) but the YaST system struggled at the 'test' stage, so after a 
couple of jam/re-boots I didn't persist.

=Contrarily to your point Tet, Fed10 gave me the familiar (to me) 
system-config-... routines and although the distro didn't recognise 
either monitor out-of-the-box, it did allow me to manually configure, 
and stickily!

=Opposite of your experience? YMMV!


> Tet


=Regards,
=dn

PS note to Deb/untu: I'd be worried - don't M$ have the patent on "I 
know better than a dumb user" code?

PPS that is not to say that first-timers and other 'simple users' (and 
this is a non-dev, non-server, simple email, web, etc box) are not 
usually well advised to use Ubuntu, etc.
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