Package: xbase-clients Version: 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 Priority: wishlist I have thought on this issue while fixing a sarge installation in a Dell desktop (I believe it was an OptiPlex 170L) which should use the i810 device driver. The problem with it, however, is that after a standard Debian installation (sarge rc2 net install) even though the X configuration discovered the i810 card and suggested the driver the 2.6.8 kernel would not load the driver and X wouldn't work.
I offered the user an alternate possibility, that is, configuring X with the vesa driver, it wouldn't have all the bells&whistles, but it would probably work. And it did work, as it turned out. Could it be possible (I'm not sure if this should be done by startx or if this should be implemented in other tools, for example, gdm) to have X failback to a "safe" configuration for VGA displays if it's unable to load a given driver. The startx could try to load the XF86Config-4 and, if a driver error was detected (cannot setup the configured display) try to startup with an alternate configuration in which the 'vesa' (or 'vga'?) driver is used for the video card instead? (maintaining the other settings) Doing that and providing some proper input (through log files, maybe syslog) could avoid having users wonder why don't they get the fancy graphics they are expecting and instead get thrown to an obscure shell. Googling I've found this has also been asked for Red Hat [1] already :-) Regards Javier [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=102289
