GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 560827
don't allow impossible resolutions, and provide a Reset button
Last modified: 2010-05-18 17:03:41 UTC
It is possible to set a bad screen resolution using gnome-display-properties in the following ways: - while the "does this look okay?" timed message is showing and the resolution is incorrect (black screen), get a computer crash, power loss, press the wrong key, or any other weirdness - change video cards, or change screens, or change computers while keeping the same home partition In any of these cases, gnome would currently start with a black screen and no way to fix it except being extremely knowledgable and knowing to remove some hidden monitors.xml file. Bad. At the same time, there are many times when one would benefit from having a Reset button in gnome-display-properties (that removes the monitors.xml file) to - troubleshoot Xorg - make the gnome screen resolution coïncide with Xorg's resolution again I've seen lots of users that have fiddled with gnome-display-properties, and then they wonder why their changes to xorg.conf don't apply later down the road.
*** Bug 563750 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The first case that you mention should not happen anymore. If you restart your computer while the "does this look OK?" dialog is up, then your previously-used configuration will get used when you log in again. Please report back if this is not the case. About the second case, in openSUSE we have a patch that makes your configuration not be applied if xorg.conf is newer. Would that be enough?
Hmm, this sounds quite reasonable. If xorg.conf has changed since the last change in monitors.xml, we can indeed assume that the displays may need to be reprobed by the gnome-display-properties thingy (and, as far as I know, its effects are only temporary when using multiple screens).
Created attachment 161367 [details] [review] gnome-settings-daemon-bgo560827-ignore-user-if-xorg-conf-is-newer.diff For reference, here is the patch that we used in openSUSE. I am not going to commit this patch for the following reason: These days xorg.conf is deprecated in favor of automatically detecting and configuring all hardware. Also, this patch needs to be tweaked so that the "default boot configuration" will get applied if it is newer than xorg.conf, but not if it is older. Feel free to use the patch as you wish. If you have time to improve it so that everything falls back based on timestamps, I will certainly review it for inclusion. Thanks!
(If you fix that stuff in the patch, please reopen the bug and resubmit the patch; thanks!)