[SOLVED] Primer on X?

[littlebigman]

Hello

As I try to understand why an Xubuntu 9.10-based liveCD I'm using won't 1) use a higher definition than 800x600, and 2) while logged on locally, let me change the keyboard layout from US to FR... I figure I should read a bit about how X works and the different issues, eg. I vaguely remember that some video chipsets (Nvidia?) require some proprietay driver to be installed.

Does someone know of a good primer to get the big picture?

Thank you.

PS: I suspect both issues are related. For those interested, here's some information:

# ps aux | grep X | grep -v grep
root      2477  0.1  1.7  23552 17056 tty7     Ss+  16:37   0:06
/usr/bin/X11/X -nolisten tcp -auth /var/run/slim.auth vt07

# export DISPLAY=":0.0"

# xhost +localhost
No protocol specified
xhost:  unable to open display ":0.0"

[oz]

The X.org website has a wiki with lots of good info, but sometimes it's hard to find what you are looking for there:

X.Org Wiki - Home

Otherwise, many of the different distros have their own wiki pages with info about xorg and configuring it, such as the wiki page found at the Arch Wiki:

Xorg - ArchWiki

In these distro specific wiki pages, some of what is mentioned might apply only to that particular distro, while other parts might apply to all distros. Gentoo used to have a huge amount of documentation in place but I think their site got cracked/hacked somewhere along the way and they lost some of it. I'm not sure what all might have been reinstated since that time.

Hope that helps and is the kind of primer you are looking for.

[littlebigman]

Thanks for the links. Indeed, the docs on the X.org site can be a bit old or without enough structure.

I haven't found an article here or elsewhere that would explain the issues Linux users can have when working with X (low resolution because of missing driver or wrong settings in configuration file, wrong horizontal position, etc.)

[littlebigman]

For those interested in knowing more about X:

"X Power Tools" by Chris Tyler
Amazon.com: X Power Tools (9780596101954): Chris Tyler: Books