Helping folks with xrandr issues

[Kai Hendry]

Hi there,

What's good general advice for dealing with xrandr issues for end users?

I tried to help a user here:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/123953/
And I ended up pointing him to Intel's report bug page
http://intellinuxgraphics.org/how_to_report_bug.html which does seem
to be a really high barrier for entry for average Joe User.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/webc-users/0lTYXqQLkJw/it626uMsAk8J
is an nvidia issue (I think) on the Debian based distro I work on. I'm
not sure what actually power the nvidia hardware here, though the
package list can be found at:
http://download.webconverger.com/webc-12.3.txt

I did a search for his error message on this list and I did find
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-driver-ati/2011-February/019142.html
But Michael did try to add a new modeline and still has the same
problem: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/webc-users/0lTYXqQLkJw/qbE9RcfEMeAJ

In these cases can I assume it's the video drivers fault if xrandr fails?

Any other hints to help debugging would be great. For example when I
switch to some modes in xrandr on some machines, the monitor just goes
black and then I'm not sure what to do next.


Thank you for any tips in advance,