Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

11.3.2 - Our example machine
As a demonstration of setting up X, we will use an old Celeron 400MHz system, with an AGP video 
slot. The video card is an old AGP card, shown in the dmesg as: 
vga1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "3DFX Interactive Banshee" 
rev 0x03
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq11.html (6 of 14)9/4/2011 10:02:17 AM

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11 - The X Window System
This is a once high-end video card, with 16M RAM, but is now mostly unsupported on modern versions 
of "mainstream" operating systems. The monitor attached to the system is a Sony Multiscan G400 19" 
CRT monitor, and it would be nice to run this monitor at 1280x1024, with a decent refresh rate, and 24 
bit color. 
First, after installing OpenBSD with X (and making sure the aperture driver is enabled in the kernel), 
let's see what X.Org's auto detection and configuration does, after all, we might get lucky. So, we simply 
log in and use the command 
startx(1)
. The screen goes blank for a few moments, then we get the X 
"checkerboard" background, the "X" cursor, and then an xterm window. 
It works! 
More or less. While the system is fully functional, it doesn't appear to have picked up any of the 
capabilities of the monitor, and is running at what is clearly a low resolution (640x480). We hope to do 
better than this. Much better, in fact. This does mean we need to make our own xorg.conf file, however. 
Let's use the "X -configure" process to generate a starting 
xorg.conf
file. You will need to do this as 
root: 
# X -configure
[...]
Your xorg.conf file is /root/xorg.conf.new
To test the server, run 'X -config /root/xorg.conf.new'
By the way, the message is serious -- use the entire path to your 
xorg.conf.new
file, even if it is 
sitting in your current default directory. Failing to do so will result in 
X(7)
not finding the file, and it 
will silently use the default configuration, and if that had worked, you wouldn't be using this process! 
This can set back your troubleshooting quite a bit. Trust us on this. 
Let's do as it says, and see what we get: 
# X -config /root/xorg.conf.new
Now, all we get is a black screen. Things had started out so well... 
This might be a really good time to talk about ways of exiting X when started in this way. In order of 
preference: 
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