Felix Miata [mailto:mrmazda@ij.net] offered:

In far less than the time you wasted writing all those useless additional comments in the bug, maybe 5-10 minutes, you could have:

1-dropped to runlevel 3 2-run sax2 3-tested that the new xorg.conf was in fact broken using startx 4-saved the broken file 5-restored the good xorg.conf 6-returned to runlevel 5 7-attached your good & bad xorg.conf & Xorg.0.log.old files to the bug

Meanwhile, all normal "production" functions would have continued uninterrupted in runlevel 3. The respondents could have spelled this out, so only most of the blame is on you rather than all of it.

_You_ know that. I mean, _you_ know that: a) those 7 steps are 1) necessary and 2) sufficient and that b) you can do all those things safely, and be back exactly where you left, with no other introduced problems or omissions affecting your ability to continue doing the primary purpose of the computer. Less knowledgeable and practiced people don't. Those of us who aren't doing software and system config for a living, or as our major hobby, likely have just one Linux box that is also our main/only computer. So, we may tinker a bit, but any given problem is researched and solved just one time. We don't get to repeat and test and refine the fix, and toss away all our mistakes and dead-ends that we encountered while getting there, cuz at that point, we're done. There's no second, third, and twenty-fourth computer on which to consolidate our grasp and pile up some experience. After the next SUSE version is installed, that problem is gone, or if it's back it's back with a new cause. Many people actually need to do a thing more than once to learn it and retain it. For example, I had to learn to calculate mode-lines and such, to get my video working properly in SuSE 7.point.something. You'd expect me to know how to do that (and why and where and...) today. But I couldn't. I'd have to research it again. I'd have a small advantage of having an idea where to start, or some search terms to use ... but there's the disadvantage of five million additional pages on the web, on roughly that topic, since the last time. After I finally fixed the problem once, I stopped, because that was my only computer. Having stopped, I did not re-inforce my learning. I definitely did not streamline it and clean out all the hundreds of false starts and dead-ends that made the first time take a month. So those wrong approaches are all still there, waiting to trip me, and undermining any confidence if I had to tackle another video config problem today. Not interesting, but just one explanation of why not everybody knows what to do to gather just the right bug-diagnosing info, and why they don't have the confidence to do it... if they're working on a computer that needs to stay available for their real work or their real hobby. Yes, I know you get over that kind of trepidation real quick if you land in a job where you configure ten computers a day, every day, while debugging networks, recovering databases, etc... but then, you don't land in a job like that if you aren't suited to it. Kevin (whose SUSE PC mostly works, and who is waiting for 10.2 to see if what doesn't work will be magically fixed... and what new thing will not-quite-work) The information contained in this electronic mail transmission may be privileged and confidential, and therefore, protected from disclosure. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by replying to this message and deleting it from your computer without copying or disclosing it.