Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 137759
X crashes when 2nd monitor is configured but disconnected
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:53 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040922 Description of problem: My system is a thinkpad T30 (Radeon 7500 Mobility graphics chip, 1400x1050 lcd). When I'm working at home I have an external monitor plugged in (dell 2000FP 1600x1200). I configure the system to use xinerama for a spanning desktop. If I shut down the machine, unplug the external monitor, and restart, the X server crashes on startup a few times. It finally gives up and leaves me in a text mode login. I have to remember the location of the config file, hand edit it to remove the dual-head setup, save, and reboot. It's a hassle and it's not anything I could explain to a non-technical user. "That Other OS" quickly recognizes this (rather common for a laptop) configuration change and boots single monitor. X should do this too. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-6.7.0.9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Use system-config-display to setup dual head mode, with spanning desktops. 2. confirm that it's working properly 3. shut down 4. disconnect 2nd monitor 5. reboot Actual Results: As noted in description, X completely fails to startup and you have to hand-edit its config file and reboot. Expected Results: Good: Recognize the missing 2nd monitor and (for that boot only) disable dual head Better: Support multiple config files so the user could specifically dial in their single and dual monitor settings. Additional info:
Thanks for your report. I agree that it would be wonderful if the X.Org X server had this functionality, however the lack of this type of feature is a design limitation rather than a bug. In order to have this type of functionality requires X.Org upstream development to implement the necessary functionality to do this into a future X.Org X11 release. If you would like to see this type of feature be available in a future X.Org release, you can request a feature enhancement by filing a bug report at http://bugs.freedesktop.org in the 'xorg' component and marking it as an enhancement request. Once the X.Org developers enhance the server to provide this functionality and a new X11 version is released which includes this ability, it will eventually get integrated into a future release of Fedora Core. Setting status to "NOTABUG", as we do not track upstream X.Org feature requests in our local bugzilla.