prioritize drivers in xorg.conf instead of fixing one

[shaggy]

If one chooses a proprietary driver like nvidia xorg.conf is set up to use only this one, no matter what happens.

Is it possible to not exclusively set up nvidia as a driver, but include it into the xorg's autodetection with high priority? Or is it possible to choose it as "the one driver", but still have a fallback to the autodetection mode in case using nvidia fails - which would then choose nv or vesa.

More a question than a bug.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Wouldn't that make it exceedingly confusing for users? They configure xorg.conf to specify using "foo" driver, but are surprised to see "bar" is loaded instead. Wouldn't they consider that a bug? Maybe you should explain what problem you're actually trying to solve here?

[shaggy (slimshaggy)]

Okay, usually users set up a proprietary driver with the graphical tool for proprietary drivers.

This tool sets up the nvidia proprietary driver in xorg.conf. The users instead, doesnt know about technical details like xorg.conf at all.

I noticed very often in our linux user group that there are problems with kernel updates and no proprietary nvidia module can be loaded. The Ubuntu distribution improved a lot in handling the proprietary drivers so this shouldnt happen, and i dont blame Ubuntu for situations where it happens anyhow.
Users that have to build kernel or graphic driver from sources will meet the problem all the time, that they have to deal with failsafe xorg.

So, what i'd like to see is that xorg should smoothly initialize with the nv driver at the correct solution if proprietary driver is not available. This would be better than running into the complicated failsafe xorg which is not even localized, i found that users are very frustrated with it.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

the xserver already has a fallback-method to do that. It just doesn't (currently) work if there's an xorg.conf available, and the support for proprietary drivers should be patched in.

[gsmx (gsmx)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better. Examining the information you have given us, this does not appear to be a bug report so we are closing it and converting it to a question in the support tracker. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but it would make more sense to raise problems you are having in the support tracker at https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu if you are uncertain if they are bugs. For help on reporting bugs, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs .

[gsmx (gsmx)]

My bad, it's not a question, but a bug anyway as Timo Aaltonen says. My apologies.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Both proprietary drivers now support autodetection as of natty