Device

Each Device section configures one video card on the system. While one Device section is the minimum, additional instances may occur for each video card installed on the machine.

The best way to configure a video card is to configure X during the installation process or by using the X Configuration Tool. For more about using the X Configuration Tool, refer to X Window System Configuration.

The following example illustrates a typical Device section for a video card:

Article "Device"
 Identifier  "Videocard0"
 Driver      "mga"
 VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
 BoardName   "Matrox Millennium G200"
 VideoRam    8192
 Option      "dpms"
EndArticle

The following entries are commonly used in the Device section:

• Identifier - Specifies a unique name for this Device section. This is a required entry.

• Driver - Specifies which driver the X server must load to utilize the video card. A list of drivers can be found in /usr/share/hwdata/videodrivers, which is installed with the hwdata package.
• VendorName - An optional parameter which specifies the vendor of the video card.
• BoardName - An optional parameter which specifies the name of the video card.
• VideoRam - An optional parameter which specifies the amount of RAM available on the video card in kilobytes. This setting is only necessary for video cards the X server cannot probe to detect the amount of video RAM.
• BusID - An entry which specifies the bus location of the video card. On systems with only one video card a BusID entry is optional and may not even be present in the default /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. On systems with more than one video card, however, a BusID entry must be present.
• Screen - An optional entry which specifies which monitor connector or head on the video card the Device section configures. This option is only useful for video cards with multiple heads.

  If multiple monitors are connected to different heads on the same video card, separate Device sections must exist and each of these sections must have a different Screen value.

  Values for the Screen entry must be an integer. The first head on the video card has a value of 0. The value for each additional head increments this value by one.

• Option "<option-name>" - An optional entry which specifies extra parameters for the section. Replace <option-name> with a valid option listed for this section in the xorg.conf man page.

  One of the more common options is "dpms" (for Display Power Management Signaling, a VESA standard), which activates the Service Star energy compliance setting for the monitor.