is xorg.conf still needed

Thorsten Leemhuis fedora at leemhuis.info
Wed Apr 30 14:09:11 UTC 2008


On 30.04.2008 15:41, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-04-30 at 12:52 +1000, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
 >
>> [1] The nvidia service from livna tries to
>> run /usr/sbin/nvidia-config-display which seems to require a xorg.conf
>> file in place.  It appears that either (a) livna will need to work
>> around the absence of this file by creating one (how?), and eventually
>> (b) that nvidia will need to rewrite their software to recognize that
>> the file need not exist.
> 
> The driver selection heuristic is the open source native driver for the
> hardware, if it exists, followed by vesa.  Changing this (ie, to force
> vesa, or to use a closed driver) requires writing a config file.
> 
> % system-config-display --noui --set-driver=nvidia
> 
> Will write a standard minimal config with the driver set to 'nvidia'.

I suppose that will work if the user installed the drivers manually with 
the nvidia-installer, as that simply overwrites some files from mesa or 
xorg as shipped by Fedora.

It won't work properly with the livna driver-packages afaik as those 
have to places some files in different directories (as we can't simply 
overwrite files with rpm and don't want to) and do some magic with 
/etc/ld.so.conf and a special ModulePath in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (¹) to 
make the linker and Xorg find those files (otherwise 3d won't work with 
the drivers; 2d will).

That's far from ideal and breaks quite often (for example with some 
proprietary games that have a hard coded rpath to libGL.so.1). I hope 
Fedora and Livna/RPM Fusion can work out a better solution in the future 
to avoid that mess. Steward (he maintains the fglrx and nvidia drivers 
in Livna) some months ago on this list suggested to switch to using 
alternatives for libGL.so.1, but he didn't get much (or any?) feedback 
on that. :-/

CU
knurd

(¹) -- that might become more complicated if there isn't any xorg.conf




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