Dear all,

Is there a command that will tell me what settings XFree is actually using? Rather like ifconfig but for monitor settings.

I have what seems to me to be a slightly odd story to tell about screen settings. I don't really know what I'm doing with graphics so maybe it all makes sense to someone who does know.

I bought me a new sparkling brand new monitor, I did. Plugged it into to my KVM switch & started my venerable P2 on which I do much of my development work. The screen displayed beautifully when it entered graphical mode x'cept that in the middle of the screen was a box complaining that the screen input signal was out of range.

So I tinkered with the /etc/X11/XFConfig-4 file, and I tinkered and I tinkered, and I made a noteworthy find when my tinkering didn't work .. there's a program called read-edid that will read monitor specs including timings and all and print them as an XFree Monitor section. I used that and I tinkered and I tinkered and still the monitor was out of sync.

Finally at my wits end and quite certain that my Config file was perfectly OK I wanted to find out exactly what settings XFree was using so that I could compare them with the manufacturer's specs. So I opened up the gui screen manager in the hope of enlightenment (shudder at the thought of gui) and of course the settings weren't there to be found. However I clicked the 800x600 box and presto it worked. The resolution is pitifully low but the screen didn't complain any more.

I whipped up the XFConfig file to see how the gui had changed it, only to find no changes whatsoever. So... where did the gui change the settings? And how? And the original question remains...how do I get X to tell me what settings it's using?

View the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file for details on exactly what the xserver did.