Comment 25 for bug 3731

I would like to add that X often does not detect the monitor either. In some cases xresprobe or similar can read the monitor info but X cannot. Sometimes it is the other way around. I suspect there are some marginal setups that require several retries/longer timeouts than usual.

And there are several ways to read the info. One can usually query bios or read the info from the monitor. Sometimes one way works and other returns nothing or nonsense.

And reading the info is not always reliable. Even if the monitor is connected and turned on.
I just started X about a dozen times, and once it came in 800x600@60. Just killing the server and starting a new one fixed the problem.

Some drivers in X do not rely on the info returned from the monitor. In the ideal case a xorg.conf with no monitor settings should work. However, some graphics card drivers require a special option to actually use the information read from the monitor.