Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I (and many of you too) know the intent of xorgwizard. It allows selection of video adapter driver(s) and changes to video adapter characteristics.

BUT IT IS FLAWED!

A forum distro 'may' have multiple adapters within it base which can be selected. Xorgwizard does NOT help the user in choosing the driver from the multiple of drivers the distro has for selection. If you are a new user or even experienced one who cannot get to desktop because the appropriate driver is not selected, there is no hint nor any list that would be helpful to any forum user at this point in xorgwizard.

I believe this IS AN OVERSIGHT, when the original author designed it, where he/she probably intended to revisit xorgwizard to resolve, but never did,

This oversight has lingered far too long.

This post is a request of forum developers to step in and "fix" this oversight. Minimally there should be some way for either this screen to offer access to the list of drivers in the system for selection or to branch to a screen that list choices if nothing is populated in this screen.

Is there any developer who can help for this important feature to be fixed?

I lack the skills to do a proper update for a selection feature to xorgwizard.

If it knew the answer, there would be no need to ask.

@Keef, I think @Clarity means that he would like to see the list of available drivers, instead of blindly typing the name. Like the xorgwizard we have in Fatdog. Anybody who is interested can lift if up from Fatdog and use/include it in their Puppies (note: modifications may be needed).

@jamesbond :-

Whilst I can see where Clarity's coming from with this, Jim, I'm not sure he's actually thought this through, y'know?

Having the full list of available drivers is all well and good, but only experienced users are going to be in a position to recognise the contents of such a list. Inexperienced beginners are NOT going to know what they're looking at, much less comprehend what it is they're supposed to use.

I'm probably right in assuming that the majority of even our long-term veteran users don't usually bother with manually selecting an appropriate driver, and are content to let xorgwizard choose the right one FOR them (unless they perhaps have 'awkward' hardware, and know from prior experience that a particular driver works better than any other, in which case they WILL select it anyway).

99% of the time, xorgwizard usually makes the right choice. I'm perhaps considered an experienced user after a decade or so, and even I let xorgwizard decide for me.

It sounds like Clarity also expects some kind of built-in help document, too.....detailing available drivers, what they're for and how they should be used, along with helping the beginner to choose the right one in the first place?

I have to confess, it's years since I've actually seen that screen.....but then, I'm not constantly & ceaselessly distro-hopping and trying out everything in sight the way Clarity does. I like to stick with a handful of Pups and fine-tune them till they're just how I want them.

Ah well. Each to their own...

(*shrug...*)

Mike.

Thanks @jamesbond that's what I foresee for forum distros.

Sometimes/often a distro wnen booted lands at the distros console without starting the desktop due to a need for user directing the proper video to use.

Your screen shows the distro user what the names are of the drivers such that user knowledge and selection can occur.

@mikewalsh I am not so sure you are properly representing my efforts.

Thansk to all

As a user of slackware-based versions, I have always seen a list of available graphics drivers (I think there was an option to select from a list). On my laptops and computers there was always a sticker of the graphics card manufacturer (ATI/nVidia/Intel), and that's what I suggested when choosing a driver. Alternatively, I chose modesetting or vesa for live versions of distros.

@mikewalsh: Mike, I agree with you on most counts. We haven't needed to use xorgwizard for the longest time, since the time Xorg was able to guess and use the correct driver on its own (around 2010).

But we keep the (completely re-written) xorgwizard until today, for:
a) difficult situations where we have to force Xorg to use a specific driver (to mitigate problems where Xorg chooses the unwanted/wrong/broken driver), and
b) convenience to enable options which are usually disabled by default (e.g switching between UXA/SNA acceleration, etc). This could be done manually, but nice to have a UI to do that.

So yeah it's basically for emergency purposes, not for everyday use. And even in emergency situation, once the correct driver/options has been chosen, the settings will be stored in a file so you won't ever need to run it again (assuming the most common scenarios where you save your settings). But @Clarity is a special case. He likes to boot pristine (=no savefile) so I can understand his need to run xorgwizard many times if his hardware happens to be of the more difficult ones.

jamesbond wrote: ↑Sun Sep 29, 2024 4:40 pm

@mikewalsh: Mike, I agree with you on most counts. We haven't needed to use xorgwizard for the longest time, since the time Xorg was able to guess and use the correct driver on its own (around 2010).

Puppy is the only distro I know that has xorg.conf. Other distros just let X.Org do its auto-detection, and things like resolution are configured by the DE through X APIs instead of altering xorg.conf. Puppy has no DE, but it's still possible to migrate away from xorg.conf and drop xorgwizard (or almost drop it completely).

I think it would be healthier for Puppy to drop the 'automatic' variant of xorgwizard and configure input devices, display settings through libinput, xrandr, etc', instead of modifying a xorg.conf template. In the rare cases where modifying xorg.conf is the only way to configure something, this can be achieved by adding tiny fragments of xorg.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d (the way Debian does it) while /etc/X11/xorg.conf doesn't exist.

In the Wayland world, xorg.conf is of course gone, so decoupling core Puppy stuff like the configuration wizards from xorg.conf is a worthwhile goal and not wasted effort.

This thread was opened to address a long standing issue with the missing feature when a booting PUP/forum-distro lands at the console without starting a desktop. Here the use of xorgwizard could have the feature expanded such that it make it much-much easier for users (new/experienced) could know the available drivers present.

The reason for this is arose when addressing the instructions @bigpup provides on the BookwormPUP64 thread for adding the nvidia driver. Following those instruction for the PUP one arrives at the driver selection screen. If a user cannot remember the 'exact' name or misspells or ??? he must abort, go find BigPUP's instructions and restart to get the proper driver spelling loaded. This would have been so easy if, for example, @fatdog's type of feature were present as the new driver would be listed and easily spotted by any user.

BUT, @dimkr strikes at an implementation that I must admit is probably on the todo list of every developer on this forum.

Over the past 2 years many/most forum distros have advanced to the new supported Linux technology for audio in the system; namely Pipewire-wireplummer and its visual admin utilities. Everyone who have built these in or have used these combinations 'know' the beneficial reasons Linux has moved from old to new.

I would assume, ALSO, that most developers are already eye'ing wayland. There are already 5 successful polished forum implementations of distros with both Pipewire and Wayland as their foundations.

This coupled with the progression of nvidia into Linux kernel and Linux world means a future where these past video issues that continue to plague this community will ultimately disappear as the new versions of forum distros advance to using the current linux video models the world's linux developers provide (wayland, etc).

That being said (by me) suggest that instead of efforts to change the old methods, it may be much wiser to leave it as it is, freeing developer resources of addressing it to, INSTEAD, focus on the issue at hand: Wayland in those PUPs which already have Pipewire.

Just a thought.