Can X do this?

[Kazade]

Hi all,

I've just been speaking to one of the Wine devs about being stuck at a low resolution when a fullscreen game crashes. He said that Windows has a concept of a temporary resolution change (CDS_FULLSCREEN flag), which will reset the resolution if the app crashes. Does xrandr/xserver have anything like this, if not, why not?

Luke.

[rohcQaH]

I don't think so. But this feature could be handled within wine.

If a wine program crashes, there's still wineserver running, and that should be able to do the needed cleanup work. If you want this feature, I suggest investigating there first.

[Kazade]

Sorry I should have been clearer, Wine can be patched to handle this situation, but the same thing happens with native games too. It would be something very useful for X to have, I'm just wondering why it doesn't already.

[curaga]

Open shell, type xrandr --auto
Or, ctrl-alt-keypadplus

[whizse]

There's an open request for this, but no action on it yet:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14255

[suokko]

Easy scripting solution:

#usage: give program and it parameters as argument
XRANDR_PARAMS="-s 1024x768"

$*

if [ $? ]
then
    xrandr $XRANDR_PARAMS
fi

Of course it could be possible to parse xradr output for current mode and pass that as argument instead of preset argument list

[rohcQaH]

if you're going for workarounds, the best workaround is to run the games in a second, independent X server. That way, you can still switch between game and desktop. For example:

xinit ut2004 -- :1 -br

or if you'd like to setup the second X server, just create a simple script to pass to xinit, i.e.:

#!/bin/bash

nvidia-settings --config="~/ut2004_nvidia-settings-rc" --load-config-only
xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap
ut2004

[Kazade]

Those workarounds are cool but I was more interested in whether X had something similar and apparently it doesn't, it's a shame this isn't seen as a more important issue by the devs because it's annoying enough for someone experienced in Linux to be left at a crappy resolution if a game crashes, but plain alienating to a newbie. I might look into writing a patch if/when I have some time...

[elanthis]

Those workarounds are cool but I was more interested in whether X had something similar and apparently it doesn't, it's a shame this isn't seen as a more important issue by the devs because it's annoying enough for someone experienced in Linux to be left at a crappy resolution if a game crashes, but plain alienating to a newbie. I might look into writing a patch if/when I have some time...

I'm not sure X is where this needs to be done. It perhaps is a better task for the desktop environment, which should already have bits for dealing with xrandr.