Using microcore with xorg-xvesa-lite and xbdev

[bmarkus]

I tested the procedure with a notebook with Intel and on a desktop PC with integrated ATI graphics. Without graphics-2.6.29.1-tinycore Xorg do not starts, otherwise perfect.

COMMINITY:

Would you check the above described procedure on your machine with and without graphics-2.6.29.1-tinycore and report the result, including the description of you machine (brand, model & video hw)? It would help.

[^thehatsrule^]

simple case: vesa doesn't require it.  You could also check the filelist of the graphics extension to see what's in it.

[curaga]

There are two things that require a xorg.conf still:
- keyboard language, no way to detect this
- disabling DontZap

And there are the cases where autoconfiguring simply does not work, yet manual / downloaded xorg.conf works. And complex cases with multiple keyboards/mice/monitors/cards. And proprietary drivers from vendors like Ati and Nvidia.

Re HAL - yes it is not needed for autoconfiguring. It can be used for that, but as one can see from Ubuntu, it sucks for that (have a little rarer device, and no workie until you add a file that forces it to detect). It does have a good side, input + screen hotplug (without one needs to restart Xorg).
HAL support is not compiled in, from two reasons:
- longer startup, bigger size, unneeded errors when checking for HAL and it isn't there
- HAL was not available as an extension when Xorg was made

[bmarkus]

HAL:

I don't think that HAL support in Xorg would give real benefits even if HAL is available, so it is safe to omit, also to keep TC tiny and not to increase size if not really necessary.

KEYBOARD LAYOUT:

You are right. However keyboard layout is already available in /etx/sysconfig so it is possible to create xorg.conf with keyboard def or to modify this part if already exists.

[tclfan]

While these two extensions don't really qualify as .core. as they never existed in Tiny Core, I can easily make an automatic confless Xorg with the added dependency for v2.3rc1.

Still it wil be the same concept, drop in Xorg-7.4.tcel and with appropriate dependencies into your tce directory and the system witll boot into Xorg confless.

Thank you Robert S.! Now it instills hope this significant development progress (Thank you Bela Markus and all development team!) will not die and will surfice in TCL 2.3, especially it has been very quiet on this topic for some time, which I interpret as good sign... I am anxiously looking forward to this...
In the meantime, I had an opportunity to end-user test behaviour of the confless Xorg in Austrumi 1.9.4 (another in-memory very light distro, where Xorg is default) on 5 machines and it appears to work very nicely...
Only on very old laptops (Thinkpad 600 and T23) it produced desktop with too optimistic resolution, which was easy to correct on the desktop menu.  On newer computers (one desktop and two widescreen laptops it produced beautiful desktops with the correct resolutions (Laptops 1280x800 and desktop 1920x1280 I think). Now I am not sure if all this can be attributed to confless Xorg alone or to the nVidia and ATI drivers, which are built-in by default in Austrumi.
I am pretty sure Austrumi does not use HAL. It is a small distro (91M ISO) packing lots of big applications in it, as Firefox 3.6a, Gnumeric, Skype, etc.
Zenwalk LiveCD, on the other hand, which is also using using confless Xorg renders perfectly correct resolution even on the two old laptops...  Although it utilizes HAL since version 5, it behaved the same before HAL (up to version 4..
Seeing such good results and considering TCL has a fantastic project ownership and development team I can only look forward to the next release...
Just to mention, I have not seen any Linux evolving so rapidly as TCL! Although to be fair, I think Austrumi team is only two developers, so unfair to expect progress to be as rapid...