Xorg error messages are poor.

[Rocco Stanzione]

On Tuesday 28 March 2006 14:16, Andy wrote:
> If the X server is unable to start, you get a horrid looking error message
> which offers to show a log file incomprehensible to 99% of the population
> (see my picture: http://i1.tinypic.com/sfulab.jpg ).
>
> Instead perhaps we could show a friendly error message, and offer to try
> and guess a safe configuration (or perhaps just run dpkg-reconfigure)?
>
> Unfortunately commands like dpkg-reconfigure or editing a file named
> /etc/X11/xorg.conf aren't obvious to non-geeks, especially if the GUI is
> broken so you can't search for help (and worse still typing help on the
> command line brings up 'help' for bash rather than the general system!)
>
> Regards, and congrats on a fine distro.
>
> Andy (hope I posted this to the right list!)
>
> one more thing - an error suggesting that 'no screens could be found' seems
> extremely odd to a non-techie user - I mean that message is itself
> displayed on the screen, isn't it?! ;)

I don't know that we should be mucking with Xorg code to friendly up the error 
messages, but I agree that a failure of X must be incredibly frustrating to 
someone who doesn't know what to do about it, and the error messages it 
provides aren't especially helpful to anyone who hasn't seen them often 
enough to know what they really mean.  Is it feasible to create a wrapper 
around X that can capture this output and present to the user some more 
useful information?  For example, it could grep /var/log/Xorg.$DISPLAY.log 
for (EE) lines, check dmesg for video-related messages, perhaps lint-check 
xorg.conf, etc. or even fall back (as previously discussed) to a vesa config 
for troubleshooting in a friendlier environment.

Rocco Stanzione