Practical boot sequence modifications

[Simon Edwards]

On Wednesday 28 December 2005 00:33, John Richard Moser wrote:
>  - Configure X properly
> 
>    If you install Ubuntu with a Radeon, X will have the 'radeon' driver
> used; this is because it detects that i.e. Radeon 9200 is supported by
> the 'radeon' driver with full 3D acceleration.  If you then pull the
> Radeon and switch to a GeForce 2, X will no longer start because Ubuntu
> does not recognize at boot that 'nv' or 'nvidia' needs to be used.
> 
>    There are 2 solutions here.  First, you could have X reconfigured
> each boot on hardware change, as with LiveCDs.  The other solution is to
> submit a patch to the Xorg project to fall back to Vesa on such
> failures-- a solution that may be more robust, as the user can be
> queried for reconfigurations in a graphical environment.  In either
> case, manual tweaks to xorg.conf will likely be lost.

Solution 3. If Xorg fails to startup or crashes, then it should automatically 
fall back on to a generic Vesa xorg.conf file (or maybe try a "Last Known 
Good" configuration file). This solution also handles the case where the user 
has changed the xorg.conf file directly, or via a configuration utility like 
what I'm working on for Kubuntu, and the new config crashes the X server.

I'm also thinking about how best to handle hardware changes. Automatically 
reverting to a Vesa config at boot time if the gfx hardware has changed, 
sounds like a good idea to me. I'll get a chance to test this stuff out in 
practice once I start swapping wierd and wonderful gfx cards in and out of my 
test machine.

cheers,

-- 
Simon Edwards             | Guarddog Firewall
simon at simonzone.com       | http://www.simonzone.com/software/
Nijmegen, The Netherlands | "ZooTV? You made the right choice."