I have the xorg.conf built by xorgconfig, but of course I'm lacking scroll wheel capabilities and hardware acceleration.

Whenever I try to edit ANYTHING in the xorg.conf, as simple as adding the option line to the mouse to bind the z axis or uncommenting the dri line, xorg.conf becomes unable to boot. The log doesn't show anything, maybe it's written somewhere besides /var/log, but I can see what X was doing back on the terminal and it shows the last 40 lines or so (all I can see) all say the command (EndSection, Monitor, etc.) and then Unknown.

I've tried editing with Kedit and vim, same results.

If I install the ATI driver off their site it will edit xorg.conf for me and boot fine, but then I need to force refresh rates on the seperate monitors and still change dri to get hardware acceleration, and its broken again.

Anybody have any idea on the cause?

What distro do you have?

Ahner has "Slackware 10.2" in his sig. You don't have any mention of your distro in your sig.

Eric

Ahner, you might want to tell us what you added to your xorg.conf and where. The editors are most likely not at fault.

Eric

I've uncommented the dri line
(these are all done 1 by one, not together)
Added option lines to get mx510 buttons to work (copied straight out of other threads I found -- and not changing the device name or location, just the option lines)
Tried to change names of screens and monitors and use option lines to define hsync/vsync ranges.

It would help if you actually post an xorg.conf file you edited that doesn't work. Much easier to spot the problem that way.

We assume you're editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root, are we right?