Xorg.conf and nouveau driver

[sawbona at gmx.net]

Hello:

Admin: not sure this is the right place to ask about this, if not plase advise.

To my question:

The box I have had for the last nine years is a Sun Microsystems Ultra 24 workstation
(Q9550+8Gb RAM) now running Devuan Daedalus and a pair of matching Nvidia Quadro
FX580/G96CGL cards feeding three 19" monitors. There is a smaller fourth one on stand-by
as my desk ran our of space and never got around to setting it up.

But I digress ...

Up until a week ago, I was running on Devuan Beowulf with the Nvidia 340.108 drivers for the
FX 580s, but a distribution upgrade was overdue so I reluctantly upgraded (by way of
Devuan Chimaera) to Devuan Daedalus and the nouveau drivers.

More than anything because they had surprised me when I tested a Devuan Live installation
*.iso: on boot, they just worked.

With this same box and from the very start, I used the Nvidia drivers which went on to
become legacy drivers and then unsupported by Nvidia.

Even with different model cards, they always worked as expected, only requiring a properly
written Xorg.conf file to get the monitors working as needed.

When I say properly written I say it deliberately as getting it done was (to me, at the time) a
merciless task but it was worth it.

In the following years I was able to use the very same configuration file through various
distributions, from Ubuntu, Mint, PCLinuxOS, CrunchBang, Debian and finally Devuan Jesse
onwards to Beowulf.

That has not been possible with the nouveau (1:1.0.17-2) drivers but, just like with the Live
*.iso I tested before upgrading, once the upgrade was installed, it worked without much ado.

There were issues with the native Xfce compositor which were solved first with compton
(unmaintained) and then with picom v9.1.

That said, I cannot find exactly where whatever settings nouveau uses are stored.
ie: where is the Xorg.conf file?

If I run Xorg -configure from the command line (as root in grub maintenance mode) I get an
Xorg.conf.new to check/edit but, much to my chagrin, it does not work.
I just get blank screens.

Upon inspection, I can see that it is incomplete and not detecting one of the monitors.
ie: it is obviously not the same configuration the xserver is using to get my rig up and running.

So the question is:
How can I get a copy/printout of the Xorg.conf settings that the nouveau drivers are actually
using once the system is up and running?

Xorg -configure is not providing it, probably because at that stage, only one of the cards
(primary) has been initialised.

Thanks in advance.

Best,

JHM