Gnome KDE Xorg.conf

Matej Cepl mcepl at redhat.com
Fri May 11 09:39:28 UTC 2007


On 2007-05-10, 12:28 GMT, Franck Y wrote:
> For example, i want to install the ATI driver and it tells me 
> to give the xorg.conf, do i have to create and empty one ?

I have two answers for you -- the first you won't like, but 
I would feel like cheating if I didn't tell it to you.

1) Don't. I mean don't install ATI binary only driver. Let me 
   explain in couple of more words.

   Aside from philosophical position against closed binary 
   drivers, I have couple of practical issues with them. I am 
   a bugmaster for the desktop team at Red Hat (something like 
   janitor in bugzilla, not developer) and so I saw many many 
   bugs for Xorg. Two conclusions:

   a) When you will come to me crying that your X doesn't work 
      well with ATI binary drivers (i.e., you file a bug report 
      against xorg* component), I will have no mercy with you and 
      close your bug as CANTFIX until you will be able to 
      reproduce the issue with opensource (xorg) drivers.

   b) My main work is on xorg bugs, but I sometimes work on other 
      components as well, mostly gecko-related lately. Because of 
      experience from xorg bugs, I am watching closely on things 
      which are usually overlooked, like for example in this 
      case, what drivers are used. I found couple of firefox 
      bugs, where changing from ATI binary driver to opensource 
      one (albeit with a loss of functionality) made bug to 
      disappear. I am quite certain, that many other bugs in 
      other components could be explained by bugs in ATI 
      drivers.

   So, my conclusion is that if you need your computer for 
   something serious (not only games playing), I would go, sell 
   your ATI card on eBay, and buy some nice Intel one -- you get 
   open source drivers, maintained by both stellar team at Intel 
   and all xorg programmers, and you will get support for your 
   other applications without my suspicion, that actually ATI 
   drivers are culprit.

2) If you don't mind unstability, and abuse from me on bugzilla 
   (no, I am nice even to users of binary drivers ;-)), then you 
   can get your /etc/X11/xorg.conf by running 
   system-config-display, which is legacy tool still available in 
   Fedora, which generates configuration files.

Best,

Matej




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