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The Modes section comprises a list of possible screen resolutions. The list is
checked by the X server from left to right. For each resolution, the X server
searches for a suitable Modeline in the Modes section. The Modeline depends
on the capability of both the monitor and the graphics card. The Monitor settings
determine the resulting Modeline.
The first resolution found is the Default mode. With Ctrl + Alt + + (on the
number pad), switch to the next resolution in the list to the right. With Ctrl + Alt
+ – (on the number pad), switch to the previous. This enables you to vary the
resolution while X is running.
The last line of the Display subsection with Depth 16 refers to the size of
the virtual screen. The maximum possible size of a virtual screen depends on the
amount of memory installed on the graphics card and the desired color depth, not
on the maximum resolution of the monitor. If you omit this line, the virtual reso-
lution is just the physical resolution. Because modern graphics cards have a large
amount of video memory, you can create very large virtual desktops. However,
you may no longer be able to use 3D functionality if you fill most of the video
memory with a virtual desktop. If, for example, the card has 16 MB of video
RAM, the virtual screen can take up to 4096x4096 pixels in size at 8-bit color
depth. Especially for accelerated cards, however, it is not recommended to use
all your memory for the virtual screen, because the card's memory is also used
for several font and graphics caches.
The Identifier line (here Screen[0]) gives this section a defined name
with which it can be uniquely referenced in the following ServerLayout sec-
tion. The lines Device and Monitor specify the graphics card and the monitor
that belong to this definition. These are just links to the Device and Monitor
sections with their corresponding names or identifiers. These sections are discussed
in detail below.
23.1.2 Device Section
A device section describes a specific graphics card. You can have as many device entries
in xorg.conf as you like, provided their names are differentiated using the keyword
Identifier. If you have more than one graphics card installed, the sections are
simply numbered in order. The first one is called Device[0], the second one
Device[1], and so on. The following file shows an excerpt from the Device section
of a computer with a Matrox Millennium PCI graphics card (as configured by SaX2):
The X Window System
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