[sclug] Debian 5.0.1 & xorg

[Alex Butcher]

On Wed, 8 Jul 2009, Phillip Chandler wrote:

> Ive now installed Debian 5.0.1 I used to have problems before from xorg
> crashing.
>
> I read one post on the Ubuntu forums about intel 915 that said having
> the display as 24 colours instead of 32 would solve the problem under
> Ubuntu, as the 915 didnt like 32bit colour depth.
>
> Your all probably asking what that has to do with Debian. Well so am I,
> but heres the theory. As Ubuntu is based on Debian Im thinking that the
> same fault with Ubuntu could work under Debian as Ubuntu is a fork of
> Debian, so thats the idea.

As long as the same bug/feature is present in the Debian 5.0.1 packages as
the Ubuntu distribution that has the same problem, quite possibly.

> But I took a look at my xorg.conf and its completely blank. But read
> somewhere else that xorg has been replaced with randr, but Ive no idea
> where the randr config files are stored, and the man pages are too over
> my head.

The person that wrote what you read has got the wrong end of the stick.

RandR is the 'Resize and Rotate' extension for X. It can dynamically change
modes and resize the root and child windows accordingly.  Handy for things
like projectors and rotateable displays as the desktop fills the whole
screen (and no more), but X doesn't need to be restarted/reconfigured as it
used to to achieve the same effect.  Maybe the person that wrote what you
read figured that with randr, there's no need to specify multiple modelines
any longer, and so _for their purposes_ xorg.conf is redundant and
over-generalised. xorg.conf is useful for more than just specifying
modelines, though, as you've discovered.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that if you create an xorg.conf, Xorg
will use it. I don't know about Debian but the path to it in FC is
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.

> So my technical question is : Where would I find the randr file that
> replaces xorg, or is there a gui that runs under Debian 5 Gnome ?

randr isn't really configured as such. It's either loaded as an extension
into Xorg (default) or not.

> Thanks
> Phillip

HTH,
Alex.