Single or Dual head for laptop, Xwrapper ?

[Daniel Stone]

On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 08:06:46PM -0700, Karl Hegbloom wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 12:54 +1000, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 04:45:14PM -0700, Karl Hegbloom wrote:
> > > Had and idea... what if at boot, you use 'e' to edit the boot command,
> > > and add 'X11Layout=projector1024x768' or some such, and that made the
> > > Xwrapper launch the X server use a '-layout' configuration that
> > > includes a projector screen on the VGA port?
> >
> > This is stunningly out of the scope of Xwrapper, and far out of the
> > scope of gdm and friends.  What you're really asking here is for hotplug
> > device support and automatic configuration in X, which is so far out of
> > bountyville that it's not funny.  It'll happen, eventually.
> 
> Please explain why it is "out of the scope" of Xwrapper, so that I do
> not make that mistake in the future.

All Xwrapper does is start the X server.  It is an utterly tiny
codebase, largely because it is suid root.  There's nothing to go wrong.

> What program is it in the scope of?  What I want is to be able to have
> the X server started with a '-layout' option when a kernel boot
> parameter is added, for booting a laptop to a mode where a projector or
> external VGA monitor works.

In that case, if all you want is -layout, then you want to be making
changes to gdm.

> When I looked at how things are set up, I found no way within GDM to do
> that.  It's scripts all run after the X server is started.  Then I
> looked at how the X server is run.  It is run via Xwrapper.  That seemed
> to me to be where such a thing might go.

Um, gdm is responsible for actually starting the X server.  So I dare
say it's capable of passing paramaters to it.

> I guess the easiest thing to do is drop in an init.d script that changes
> a symlink to an xorg.conf.  But I'd rather have both configurations in
> there --- LCD only and LCD + VGA --- and choose the layout using the
> '-layout' switch to Xorg.

... you can do that.

You were asking for code changes to Xwrapper.  I explained why this was
a really bad idea.  What you want for now is small code changes for gdm
(which I don't really think is a bounty prospect), and what you actually
want is the X server to do proper device hotplug and autoconfiguration.
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