Xorg error messages are poor.

[Nicholas Battaglia]

At the very least I feel there should be an option to allow dpkg-reconfigure
to run on its own.

P.S. - I also have always felt that /etc/default/rcS should have:

FSCKFIX=yes

So that it that any errors found will be fixed automatically.

Getting strange errors when booting up, whether they are from Xorg or
whatever, are generally a frightening experience for any user, but must be
absolutely horrifying for someone new...
Just my 2 cents.

On 3/28/06, Rocco Stanzione <grasshopper at linuxkungfu.org> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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>



--
+ Nick
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