On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 02:58:33PM -0400, Pete Theisen wrote:
> steve szmidt wrote:
>> On Tuesday 15 September 2009, Pete Theisen wrote:
>>
>>> The behavior I was getting was that Ubuntu simply would not save the
>>> file. Sudo or not.
>>>
>>> Of course, you can't log into Ubuntu directly as root.
>>
>> Just give root a password and you can login as root in a shell or
> in terminal
>> mode.
>>
>> sudo passwd
>>
>> if I remember correctly.
>>
>
> Hi Steve,
>
> Won't save the video configuration no matter what. If you reboot you are
> back to whatever the default is.
Pete, there's virtually no possible way you could edit the proper config
file with the proper permissions and have X *not* respond upon restart.
First start up a console or xterm. Then do this in the console:
ls -l /etc/X11/xorg.conf
and check who owns this file and what the permissions are. Chances are,
it's owned by root:root, and the permissions are 644 (-rw-r--r--). If
so, then
sudo <root-password>
You'll notice your prompt's final character changes from '$' to '#'.
That means you're now root (the owner of the file in question). You are
also free to edit the config file. Change your modelines or whatever you
need to do. Use whatever editor you like (I'd suggest nano, since it's
the easiest for a non-geek to use). Save the file. Then:
exit
which takes you from being root to being just you. Then:
exit
which will close your console session.
X will not immediately respond to this change. It will have to be
restarted for the change to take effect. If, for some insane reason,
something in Ubuntu reverts your change, then you'll have stop X, go to
a genuine console (no X running) and make your edits from there (same
procedure as above, except for firing up and closing the console, since
you're already in it). Once done, restart X and your change should take
effect.
Really, it's that simple. You only need to be root or the owner of a
file which has owner-write permissions to edit a given file. If a file
*doesn't* have write permissions for the owner (WTF?), then issue
chmod u+w <filename>
before editing it, which should set write permissions for the owner of
the file.
In every distro I'm aware of, X is driven by xorg.conf, and in the
absence of manual tweaks in some GUI program, will follow the exact
instructions in that file. Errors will show up in /var/log/Xorg.0.log,
and other similar files. The only exception to this might be SuSE. It's
been years since I ran SuSE, but it used to be that their setup program
(YaST) would obnoxiously overwrite manual changes to config files. They
basically insisted you do all your configuring through YaST, rather than
manually hacking config files. I don't know if this is still true, but
it used to be.
Paul
-- Paul M. Foster ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided as an unmoderated internet service by Networked Knowledge Systems (NKS). Views and opinions expressed in messages posted are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of NKS or any of its employees.
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