Xorg error messages are poor.

[Rocco Stanzione]

On Thursday 30 March 2006 08:37, Scott Bronson wrote:
> > 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).
 <snip>

If we wait for Xorg, yeah, it's probably years off if it'll come at all.  But 
it doesn't have to be that way.  Look at knoppix!  I haven't looked into how 
they do it, but I'm imagining an X wrapper that detects the video card(s) and 
runs from a dynamically built xorg.conf based on that and certain user 
configuration options.  If, say, it's an nvidia card, it first tries 
the 'nvidia' driver if it's available.  If it fails it falls back to nv and 
finally to vesa if necessary, or to a fallback xorg.conf devoid of 
user-defined options, or to an previously established known-good xorg.conf.  
If all that fails the user is presented with a human-readable summary of what 
failed and recommended next steps.

Rocco Stanzione