Removable of manual display configuration on first boot (FC6)

[Adam Jackson]

On Thu, 2006-12-14 at 16:23 -0500, Chris Tyler wrote:

> This is a right direction to go -- but what about situations where it
> just can't work?
> 
> For example, in the electronic classroom configuration where I teach,
> the video output from the podium PC goes to a video splitter which
> drives an LCD panel and an LCD projector. Each of those devices has an
> optimal/native resolution, but the splitter prevents the use of DDC to
> get the monitor specs (and rightly so, because the devices may have
> different specs).

In the RANDR 1.2 world you can DDC at runtime too and reconfigure on the
fly, and we can set pipes to arbitrary resolutions when we don't get DDC
(or even when we do).  This dynamicism simply is not present in the
RANDR in Xorg 7.2, and there really is no satisfactory way to fake it
with s-c-d.

In the example you mention, X would come up at a safe mode, and you'd
force it higher with the resolution applet, and X would serialize that
setting to disk somewhere (probably _not_ in the config file) so that it
comes up right the next time.  _That_ is the model you want.

> The XInFC7 wiki page just says that we need to be able to remember/bind
> EDIDs, but there are many cases like this where we won't *get* an EDID
> at all, ever, and defaulting to the lowest common denominator is
> "decidedly suboptimal". We can't switch entirely to autoconfiguration.

Oh yes we can.  Just not in FC6.  Sorry, everyone sucks this bad right
now.  One can either paper up s-c-d as pretty as possible for RANDR 1.1,
or on make RANDR 1.2 work across all drivers.  They'll take comparable
amounts of time, so 1.2 _really_ is better.

If someone has a more pressing need for s-c-d to work better nownownow,
well, I do take patches.  But I straight-up suck at GUI programming, and
it's a worse return on investment compared to fixing RANDR, so my
natural preference is to let s-c-d languish.  By the time 1.2 is
deployable, s-c-d will need a big enough facelift anyway that it's
nearly wasted effort to work on it now.

- ajax