Re: Hal and DragonFly

[Bill Hacker <wbh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Luciani wrote:
> > Ubuntu may not, but many others do - either with modular Xorg OR (NetBSD) even
> > with XF86.
>
> Not reeeeally though. For example, if you have a new Nvidia card and Xorg thinks
> you're supposed to use the 'nv' driver but then nothing works because the card
> is too new. Or you have any type of  VIA Chrome card (which is even worse). The
> list goes on...

Actually I have two VIA and old (C3) and a new (C7) 'unichrome'

OpenBSD ships with all the right stuff, (Xenocara included).
FreeBSD 8-CURRENT is OK, as is NetBSD (still XF86).

As they are with the PCI-e ATI and nVidia cards I have here.

The auto-detection works so well nowadays the first thing I check  if 
there's a glitch is to make sure there IS NO /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

JFWIW, Slackware 12 / VectorLinux 5.9, and more recent Fedora and Ubunti 
DID have to drop into VESA until tuned-up.

Could it be that the *BSD's are getting 'desktopishness' right more 
often? I suspect more and more devel folks are working on laptops.

> The vesa driver supports many widescreen resolutions including the ones you
> mentioned. 

*now* it does. It did not roughly a year ago. And still does not in some 
'distro'

In other words, the vesa driver isn't limited to VESA standard
> resolutions. 

No - but it can, and does (or did) get the scan rate wrong for the X-Y 
on, for example, a Philips 200WS. Leaving one with a log file that shows 
it read the device spces, found the right XY - but blackscreened on too 
high a scan rate.

Go figure.

> It's not so complicated for a person to switch to his favorite xorg
> driver after install.
>
> No big deal though, if people think that Xorg autodetection is sufficiently
> good, that's what we'll use.

It has gotten seriously good over the past year or so.

I've got a near-as-dammit *identical* Xfce4 desktop & apps running on 
C3, C7 and a Lenovo G400 / 3000 each with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, & 
VectorLinux.

Not sure how much longer I'll leave the Mac unmolested....

;-)