a place in the sun
about Sun, Solaris 10 and Java Workstation w2100z -- Posts with "sunshine" in titles will praise SUNW, Solaris 10 or w2100z. Posts with "sunspot" will complain. Other posts will fall somewhere in-between.
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2005-06-06
sunspot - xorg.conf and Gnome/JDS snafu
Well it's not really Sun's fault that bug like xorg.conf lives on. But if Sun had paid any attention to usability, they would've supplied a decent tool to generate xorg.conf instead of forcing users to edit that dirty garbage by hand. We are already 5 years into the 21st century but changing screen resolution is still stuck in 1980s. Editing xorg.conf was an embarrassment 10 years ago and now it's just a rancid piece of meat with prions from mad cows.
Installed NVIDIA's driver no problem but it generated xorg.conf with a limited resolution of 1280x1024 for a monitor that can handle 1680x1050. I made a typo first editing of xorg.conf; second edit fixed the typo and X server seems to come up okay. But that ghastly JDS/ Gnome desktop thingie died with an unspecified error. So now I have a completely black screen. A three-finger salute brings up a process viewer (inside Gnome's window manager but using good ol' Motif widget!) but it cannot launch any process for me so I am out of luck.
After a few resets, I finally have a desktop with full resolution. But getting here wasted almost an hour of my time. I wonder how much time I'll waste trying to make dual display work?
At 23:46 by Jay 
Yeah there is a command line binary that guides you through editing xorg.confbut I find it brittle and unreliable. Besides you can't do preview of new resolution.
Too bad that good old kdmconfig is limited to xsun server.
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Jay Han