Posts tagged ‘xorg’

xorg.conf fix in Fedora 10, Ubuntu 9.04 and others

May 8, 2009, 8:16 am
xorg.png

I’m seeing questions all the time for “where did my xorg.conf go in the latest Ubuntu or Fedora?”

The quick answer… press Ctrl+Alt+F2 or similar to log into a TTY console, or type ‘init 3? into a root X terminal. If you haven’t already, log in as root and  kill X or type ‘init 3? if you want to be heavy handed.  Then run:

X -configure
mv ~/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf

xorg.config in two commands.  Run the ‘init 5? command to get back to your GUI login (or kdm or gdm or startx, etc if you know what you are doing.  Worst case remove the .conf and restart.)

If you are advanced enough to edit an xorg.conf, the above should be a cakewalk and you shouldn’t complain about it.

Regardless, you should investigate ‘xrandr’ which makes it simple to do runtime adjustments.

If you are a newbie, look into a gui.  KDE has KRandRTray which makes controlling outputs and resolutions a breeze.  Don’t forget to toggle the output on with the Fn key if you are a laptop user.

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Ctrl+Alt+Backspace Disabled in Most Distributions [FIX]

May 6, 2009, 8:05 am
xorg.png
The ctrl-alt-backspace key combination was used to restart X-server and was recently disabled because of a upstream (X.org) design decision:

The Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination currently “zaps” (hard-restarts) the X server, and thus loses any unsaved data in applications, etc. This key combination is also largely undocumented, so users (probably ex-Windows users) may press this key combination without expecting data loss. This spec proposes to follow upstream’s lead and disable this key combination by default in order to prevent this usability issue from occurring in normal installs.

There are two ways of still using the Ctrl Alt Backspace behavior:

1. Press AltGR + SysRQ + K instead (AltGR is the RIGHT ALT button and SysRQ is labelled “Print Screen” most of the times, and remeber to press and hold the keys in the in the right sequence, eg. starting with ALtGR, and ending with the K(ill) key).

2. I don’t know if this works on other distributions, but on Ubuntu, you can edit you xorg.conf (/etc/X11/xorg.conf) and add the DonZap “False” value. That will make Ctrl + Alt + Backspace work again.

So to do this, edit the xorg.conf file by adding this:

Section "ServerFlags"
      Option          "DontZap"               "false"
EndSection

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Understanding xorg.conf

March 13, 2008, 2:11 pm
xorg.png

The X.Org Server (home page) is the official reference implementation of the X Window System. The current stable release is 1.4.0, released as part of X11R7.3 on 6 September 2007. It is both open source and free software. The project is supported and overseen by the X.Org Foundation and is hosted by freedesktop.org.

There’s a file in your linux system within /etc/X11/ called xorg.conf. X.org (also called the X11) server is mostly controlled through a configuration file, xorg.conf, for its initial setup. This controls much of the video output for your linux machine but also controls various peripherals as well. We’re not going to cover the entire file as there is far to much to cover but we will introduce the structure of the file and common areas new users to linux might have to face.

Continue reading ‘Understanding xorg.conf’ »

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