sax3-monitor - early comments (August-2011)

[oldcpu]

My major comment on sax3 after some testing is CONGRATULATIONS and
thankyou for managing to get this far. I think the application shows
great progress.

Some technical specifics of aspects that I either don't understand, or
items 'ear marked' for future development:

(1) when a graphic card has 2 different outputs such as VGA and DVI,
sax3-monitor appears to default to using only VGA and does not support
the DVI. This can be fixed by a hand edit to the sax3-monitor created
config files, but possibly a DVI menu selection so as to force the
addition of that line might be an approach (I don't know - just
brainstorming)

(2) it appears Xorg.0.log file is used to determine what drivers are
available. When testing on openSUSE-11.3 PC with a Radeon HD3450
(using the fglrx driver) where I know for a fact the 'radeon' driver
is available, the Xorg.0.log file only reported fglrx, radeonhd, vesa
and fbdev, and I also noted sax3-monitor only reported fglrx,
radeonhd, vesa and fbdev. Ergo the major alternative to the fglrx was
missing.

(3) when ever there is an existing /etc/X11/xorg.conf file with a
driver selected, or a configured file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/xx-
something (with a driver selected), then sax3-monitor will not show a
driver in its drop down menu (but rather it is blank). Possibly that
is because in such a case, the Xorg.0.log file also does not show a
driver. Maybe a sax3 menu warning that a 'config file is already in
place' could be provided in that case, explaining to user's why there
is no driver selection. Thats just a brainstorming idea and knowing
the functionality would be needed for both ncurses and X interfaces
means I don't have a suggestion as to how to implement the 'warning'
idea.

(4) When trying to apply with sax3-monitor a custom Horizontal/
Vertical resolution, the limitation to 40 was too restrictive and made
that feature non-functional for my attempted test.

(5) When trying to apply with sax3-monitor a custom resolution, the
limitation to ~ 1280 (?) of resolution was too restrictive and made
that feature non-functional for my attempted test

(6) When I added a custom mode line to xrandr which worked, and then
ran sax3-monitor, I noted sax3-monitor did not pickup on the fact that
there was a custom modeline in place. I don't know if checking xrandr
modelines is a desired feature (it may not be) but given item (4) and
(5) were not working, this item (6) (xrandr not being examined) meant
I could not set a higher resolution with sax3-monitor.

The testing to determine the above is all documented in the openSUSE
forum thread: http://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/pre-release-beta/464419-sax3-testers-needed.html

Once again, thank-you for your efforts in this sax3 application. It
has a number of us (who provide support in this area) excited about
its prospects.