user specific xorg.conf?

Gary Aitken freebsd at dreamchaser.org
Sun Aug 19 20:38:22 UTC 2012


Combining a couple of responses into one to cut down traffic...

On 08/19/12 11:51, Polytropon wrote:
> On Sun, 19 Aug 2012 11:44:15 -0600, Gary Aitken wrote:
>> In attempting to zero in on my system crash problem,
>> I need to customize xorg.conf.
>> As I read the documentation,
>> there is no way for an ordinary user to provide an xorg.conf;
>> Xorg looks for files in the normal server search path,
>> which does not include any user directories --
>> unless the user is root.
> 
> What if you do (as a user) the "startx" command and try
> to hand the -config <file> to the program, like this:
> 
> 	% Xorg -file /home/user/test/xorg.conf
> 
> I haven't tried that myself, but according to "man Xorg"
> this option does exist. However, I'm not sure if xinit
> or startx honors this option if you use them (to make
> use of ~/.xinitrc).

According to the man page:
  "This option will work for any file when the server is run as root
   (i.e, with real-uid 0),
   or  for files relative to a directory in the config search
   path for all other users."
The config search path only includes system directories, not user directories.
Again, I think that is for security reasons, but I'm not certain.

On 08/19/12 12:38, Jeff Tipton wrote:
> Gary, why do you need user-specific xorg.conf?
> By default, there's no xorg.conf file,
> so if you generate one and put it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf,
> your file will be used instead of the default options.
> And before putting the file there, you can test it,
> as suggested in the Manual:
> 
> X -config /root/xorg.conf.new -retro

I wanted a user-specific xorg.conf for test purposes.
The server already generated one when I first installed it, IIRC.
In general, I'd prefer to leave default generated stuff alone,
as it's easy to screw up and edit the wrong thing,
not save the original, not properly comment mods to the file, etc.

However, in this case it looks like I'll have to tweak the global file.

Gary




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