Why I think FC3 sucks!

[Bill Rugolsky Jr.]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 10:38:34PM -0500, Jim Cornette wrote:
> The programs suck. Configuring the displays to work was pretty easy 
> though. Did you have to manually edit your configuration files to get 
> things setup or were you able to use some easy to run tool?
> 
> In windows, the second display presents a text message on screen that 
> tells you where to go to configure the second monitor. You follow the 
> text directions on the second display and you are all set to go.

I agree, configuring X via a GUI to take advantage of anything more than
the most vanilla configuration is a recent development.  One should
understand, however, that the priority over these many years has been
to make X even work on hardware that is often not well documented, etc.

> I'm impressed that you can use dual-displays for a decade now. It would
> be better for this feature to be easier to configure and work for more
> cases than only for special configuration of the files or customized
> programs.

*XFree86* hasn't supported multiple displays that long, but *some* X
server has, either on Sun equipment, or the Xi Graphics product for i386
(which I used on Linux and Solaris long ago).  Multiple screen support was
a  fundamental design element of X -- that's why your $DISPLAY variable is 
:<xserver>.<screen#>.  On Windows, AFAIK, one still just gets a single
simulated large display.

In the past, multi-head was achieved with multiple video adapters --
[and those adapters, e.g., Matrox, had to have a special feature to
turn off the VGA hw registers on all but the first card].  These days,
commodity cards support dual-head, though often with various limitations
(like lower RAMDAC speed on the second head), special setup requirements
that are not (well-)documented by the vendors, etc.  One still needs
special Option lines in the device config to correctly select analog,
flat-panel, TV-Out, etc. on various cards.

And auto-configuration depends on auto-detection, which involves things
like DDC probing, matching to a database of hardware quirks and monitor
types, determining which bit-depths can be supported on each card/screen,
etc.

Remember, for the most part, X drivers have been developed by third-parties,
not the hardware vendors themselves, who supply the Windows drivers that
take full advantage of their product.

	Bill Rugolsky