Comment 7 for bug 17595

The problem still exists in feisty herd 2.

The problem was that hwdb-gui relies on the fact that xrandr -q will return some useful information. When xrandr is not present, a variable used later fails to be set. This could be easily fixed by ensuring that the variable ("retval") will be assigned to on every possible execution path.

The bigger problem I see here is that hwdb-gui has a bigger design issue. It collects data in the format "width x height @ frequency Hz". But what if the user has multiple monitors (possibly running with different frequencies)?

The question is: what kind of data does the ubuntu team want to collect? It would be no problem to collect correct information about multiple screens, color depth, running extensions, dpi etc. Is there a specification of what kind of data in which format is expected to be sent?

I've attached a patch that fixes the bug and furthermore queries "xwininfo -root" if the xrandr-query fails. I could easily extend the code to return the layout of dual-head setups but as already mentioned: I would need to know which data and which format is desired by the ubuntu team.

PS: The hwdb-gui program could need unifying tabs/whitespace.