Tips for reconfiguring xorg.conf

[jamey0824]

I was wondering being a semi linux noob, and have done so much trolling of the interet. If someone could help me speed up my testing of different things in xorg.conf. (using jaunty)

1) Is there a good method of testing (xorg.conf - gnome?) with out constantly rebooting?
2) If crap goes wrong like it often does, like locking up on entrance to gnome. Is there a way of bringing me back to command prompt. So that I can re edit xorg.conf and start gnome again. How to do that to from the command prompt?

I can read so if one does not want to take time answering this, a url will do. Thanks

[bridgman]

You don't need to reboot to test changes, just restart X.

[DeepDayze]

You don't need to reboot to test changes, just restart X.

Ditto

This is not Windows

[Zhick]

You don't need to reboot to test changes, just restart X.

Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, in case you're wondering how to restart X (not saved stuff will be lost blabla).
With some Xorg-versions this seems to be disabled by default, so you might need

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option     "DontZap"       "false"
EndSection

in your Xorg.conf

[Kano]

Instead of xorg.conf changes you can use with new Xservers (since 1.5) also hal rules to add options - I just did not write one yet. Pretty simple way to set this xorg option U 9.04:

sudo apt-get install dontzap
sudo dontzap --disable

[jamey0824]

Instead of xorg.conf changes you can use with new Xservers (since 1.5) also hal rules to add options - I just did not write one yet. Pretty simple way to set this xorg option U 9.04:

sudo apt-get install dontzap
sudo dontzap --disable

Kano:
What does one mean bye hal rules to add options, I searched and looked up hal (Hardware abstraction layer). I don't really see any options for configuring xorg.conf with HAL. Or did you mean bye your following line that you have it working but its not available to the masses yet. Thanks alot the other stuff worked nicely though.

[Kano]

Well vbox addons use hal rules, also wacom is configured by hal, take a look at

/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-linuxwacom.fdi

Also settings like keyboard layout or whatever can be configured that way - basically every setting is possible via hal. Using those match values the settings can be triggered by hardware changes for example. If you don't use match key then it is always added or merged.