Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [321]
It is difficult to specify minimum hardware requirements for running X, as this depends on a lot of external factors, how many graphical programs you are planning to run, what else is going on on your computer, and so on. But any computer sold in the last, say, 5 to 8 years should work just fine, and probably many older ones as well. You should check the documentation for X and verify that your particular card is supported before taking the plunge and purchasing expensive hardware. Benchmark rating comparisons for various video cards under X.org are posted to the Usenet newsgroups comp.windows.x.i386unix and comp.os.linux.misc regularly.
As a side note, one author's (Kalle's) tertiary personal Linux system is an AMD K6-2 with 128 MB of RAM and is equipped with a PCI Permedia II chipset card with 8 MB of DRAM. This setup is already a lot faster with respect to display speed than many workstations. X.org on a Linux system with an accelerated SVGA card will give you much greater performance than that found on commercial Unix workstations (which often employ simple framebuffers for graphics and provide accelerated graphics hardware only as a high-priced add-on).
Your machine will need at least 32 MB of physical RAM and 64 MB of virtual RAM (for example, 32 MB physical and 32 MB swap). Remember that the more physical RAM you have, the less frequently the system will swap to and from disk when memory is low. Because swapping is inherently slow (disks are very slow compared with memory), having 32 MB or more of RAM is necessary to run X.org comfortably. A system with 32 MB of physical RAM could run much more slowly (up to 10 times more slowly) than one with 64 MB or more.
Installing X.org
X.org does not provide any binary distributions, but you should be able to run those that come with your distribution just fine. On ftp://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R6.8.2/src, you can find the full source code, including instructions on how to build binaries yourself, if you really want to. (Of course, the version number of the latest version could have changed by the time you read this.)
Writing an X configuration file (called either XF86Config-4 or xorg.conf, depending on version and distribution) from scratch is a daunting undertaking, and not to be recommended. This section lists three ways of getting at least a start at a configuration file; using the documentation in this chapter, you should be able to change this to match your system in the optimal way.
The first thing you should try (after having tried your distribution's setup tool, of course) is a program called xorgcfg that ships with X.org. This is a graphical installation program that works even from the terminal, so that you can use it if you do not have any X set up yet.
If xorgcfg should fail you, your next bet would be the command already mentioned, Xorg -configure. This fires up the X server in a mode where it attempts to find out as much as possible about your hardware and writes a skeleton configuration file. This skeleton configuration might be sufficient to start up the X server, even though you may want to tune this to your needs.
If even Xorg -configure fails you (which, honestly, is quite unlikely), then you can try another text-based configuration tool as a last resort. It is called xorgconfig, and should be installed together with X.org . It will guide you through a series of questions about your hardware. If some of the questions are difficult to answer, just go with the default and see what you end up with. In the end, you should again end up with a skeleton configuration file.
Configuring X.org
Setting up X.org is not difficult in most cases. However, if you happen to be using hardware for which drivers are under development, or wish to obtain the best performance or resolution from an accelerated graphics card, configuring X.org can be somewhat time-consuming.
In this