Configuration Help
If you are using a vendor-supplied Xorg (like on a Linux distribution) please follow your vendor's instruction on how to install and configure Xorg. Your vendor may have provided proprietary configuration tools. Please consult your vendor's documentation/support for information on how to use these tools.
On how to download and install Xorg from the X.Org ftp server please check the Installation Instructions on the X.Org web site.
Configuring Xorg
Xorg provides three ways to configure the Xserver:
- xorgcfg - a menu based configuration utility that can be run either with a GUI or form the text console.
- The Xserver - which can create a skeleton configuration file which should get you started.
- xorgconfig - an interactive script which asks you questions about your hardware and creates a configuration file for you.
Methods 1. and 2. will probe the graphics hardware automatically (which currently only works for PCI and AGP cards). For method 3 you will need to know your hardware. We will therefore describe only methods 1. and 2.
xorgcfg
xorgcfg is an interactive menu-driven configuration utility. It will probe your graphics hardware on startup. You can then change configuration settings interactively. To start this utility you have to become root and run xorgcfg from the command line. After probing the hardware, it will attempt to start an initial Xserver and display a graphical configuration tool. This tool allows you to configure/add your mouse and keyboard, graphics chipset and monitor. Please also consult the man page: (man 1 xorgcfg).
If for some reason xorgcfg cannot start because the initial Xserver does not come up, you can run it using the -textmode option. If xorgcfg requires a long time to start up, you can prevent it from loading and probing each driver module by using the option -nomodules. Please note that it doesn't probe your graphics hardware in this case.
Add more detailed description about how to use xorgcfg
The Xserver
The Xserver is also capable of creating its own configuration file. As root just run: X -configure. The Xserver will then load each driver module, probe for the driver and create a configuration file. The configuration file will be stored in the home directory of the user who started the Xserver (usually /root). It's called xorg.conf.new so another config file that may exist in this directory will be overwritten.
You may edit this file by hand to suit your needs. Generally you don't have to modify the mouse type, as the auto protocol should suit most needs. If your monitor is DDC capable you don't need to set up monitor ranges. This may not be true for some older cards which don't have DDC support, or if your monitor connection doesn't pass thru DDC information which is the case for some KVMs.
In case you need to set additional driver options, all available driver options are already listed in the config file. Go to the device section and remove the '#' mark at the beginning of the line. If the option requires an additional argument, the type of argument is specified at the end of the line:
[<bool>] means a boolean argument. Uncommenting the option implicitly means 'True'. To disable the option you can add the string "0", "no", "false" or "off". Likewise to enable the option you may use "1", "yes", "true" or "on".
Any integer [<int>], float [<float>] value or string [<str>] needs to be quoted in double quotes.
Frequencies [<freq>] contain a float value followed by the unit, i.e. Hz, kHz or MHz. Option names and values are case insensitive. For more information please consult man 5 xorg.conf.