Multiple X.org configs, single machine

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 10:19 AM, Thomas Charron <twaffle at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm guessing Linux would be pretty happy, with one exception..  X.

  You'll have to worry about Ethernet, sound, video, and the VMware
tools, I think.

  The VMware tools might just cough and die when booted on real
hardware, so that might be a non-issue (or only be cosmetic, i.e.,
some puke in the boot messages).

  Ethernet is usually pretty config-free.  So you might be able to get
away with just loading both Ethernet driver modules, and letting
whichever one works claim eth0.  Sound sometimes involves something
slightly more complicated, with config tweaks in /etc/modprobe.conf
and the like.  But I think you might be able to get away with a
similar tactic there.

  For video, recent versions of X can run without a config file, or
almost can.  You might starting X without a config file present, to
see if it just works.  Or maybe commenting out the hardware specific
parts of your config file to see what happens.  If that fails, you
should be able to do something like grep'ing the output of "lspci" to
find the video card (real or virtual), and then passing a parameter or
setting a symlink to specify the correct X config file.

> Windows XP just isn't happy booting off of two different machines

  What happens?  It's been a *long* time, but I seem to remember doing
this with an older version of Windows.  I can't remember if it was
Windows 2000 or 98, though, and 98 is a completely different beast vs
NT (2000/XP).

-- Ben