Hal and DragonFly

[Bill Hacker]

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....

;-)