Xorg error messages are poor.

[Scott Bronson]

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 ).

agreed.

> Instead perhaps we could show a friendly error message, and offer to try
> and guess a safe configuration (or perhaps just run dpkg-reconfigure)?

I expect that must people running stable will see this dialog when they
move a hard drive to a new machine or swap video cards.  In this case it
makes perfect sense to offer the option to reconfigure the X subsystem.
(The proper fix, of course, is to make it so X is as resilient as the
Linux kernel to hardware changes but that is still years off).

Most of the time it's happened to me, however, a dpkg-reconfigure
wouldn't have helped.  Last time I think I saw it due to a GDM theme
bug.  So reconfiguring shouldn't be the only choice.


> and worse still typing help on the
> command line brings up 'help' for bash rather than the general system!)

Interesting observation.  I never thought about it but, yes, that's some
of the most user-hostile help I've ever seen.  I vote for filing this as
a bug.

    - Scott