Blind people do not connect screens

[Steven J Newbury]

On Tue, 2009-03-03 at 21:01 +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Some blind people report that Xorg refuses to start when no screen
> is connected to their machine.  Of course they could configure their
> xorg.conf to use the dummy driver, but then they'd have to modify it
> back when using a screen etc. and distributions are more and more going
> towards full autodetection anyway.  I don't know which way would be
> fine:
> 
> - have drivers not fail when no screen is connected, but use some
>   default sane resolution.  Needs cooperation from all drivers.
> - have X.org fallback to dummy when no screen is connected.  If screen
>   detection works correctly, shouldn't harm sighted users.  Needs
>   information feedback from drivers to tell so.
> - have X.org fallback to dummy when the autodetect driver does not work.
>   May make sighted users wonder why their screen is black, but well.
> - introduce an xorg.conf option to enable some behavior above.  Doesn't
>   really match nowadays' "no xorg.conf" moto.
> - introduce an option similar to -allowMouseOpenFail.  Not really
>   convenient to automatically configure in a generic-purpose
>   distribution.
> 
I guess the ideal would be to have full hotplug video driver support
like the HAL input driver hotplug, and use the dummy driver if there are
no valid screens.  It would also be handy for docking stations and dual
video laptops of course...  Something tells me it wouldn't be easily
implemented though!