notebook / multiple visual displays - activation and control

[Tom London]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 11:05 AM, Jesse Barnes <jbarnes at virtuousgeek.org> wrote:
>
> On Monday, March 31, 2008 10:48 am Tom London wrote:
>  > Uhh....  not sure I understand what you mean.
>  >
>  > I have tested only 2 "use cases":
>  > 1. boot laptop with no external monitor (just builtin LCD).  This works
>  > fine.
>  >
>  > 2. boot laptop with internal monitor "shut" and system connected to
>  > external monitors. This goes through what seems to me to be a "funny"
>  > boot sequence:
>  >     a. gdmgreeter comes up in 1024x768
>  >     b. after presenting password, display "re-sizes" to 1280x1024 (per
>  > display "info" buttons"), but the screen shows a "tiled" version of
>  > the "blue curve" background (I get one complete copy in the upper left
>  > corner, partial tiles in the other 3 "slots").
>  >     c. after a few more seconds, the tiling vanishes, but I briefly
>  > get a "deformed" background (for about 5 seconds).
>  >    d. background becomes normal, any my startup windows appear;
>  >    e. "xdpyinfo" says the dimension is 1920x1024, as does "xrandr".
>  > Some displays are all messed up (e.g., firefox)
>  >    f. running "xrandr --size 1280x1024" repairs.  gnome-terminal
>  > windows actually don't change, but the messed up ones now are fixed.
>  >
>  > Use case 2 behaves exactly the same if I boot directly to X (via
>  > startx) instead of gdm.
>  >
>  > I've logged this all here:
>  > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=437654
>  >
>  > Not sure why I'm the only lucky one ;)  Any hints/fixes gladly welcome.
>
>  Ok, I was just trying to figure out if you also had problems hotplugging
>  displays (i.e. booting with nothing attached, then trying to plug in & enable
>  an external display); sounds like you're only complaining about the "boot up
>  with VGA connected" case here though.
>
>  I think there are at least a couple of problems:
>   1) we don't do lid switch detection very well in the Intel driver
>      this will cause X to enable both screens at boot time, picking a bad
>      default
>   2) the X "pick a default configuration" mode isn't very good
>      for one thing, it tries to clone the displays instead of setting up
>      an extended desktop, but beyond that the cloned configuration often
>      isn't what you want.  I think this is what ajax fixed (and he's working
>      on (1) also, unfortunately that's a hard problem).
>
>  Jesse
>
Thanks for the info.

No, haven't tested hotplugging.

What confuses me about 2) above is that X/xrandr seems to be
displaying and selecting modes that are just not supported by my
hardware. For example, 1600x1024 is listed by xrandr, and it appears
to willing try to set that mode ("xrandr --size 1600x1024"). But doing
so does not cause happiness (the monitor's "display info" button still
insists its in 1280x1024, and the screen is "all messed up").

[This monitor's specs (HP L1906) list 1280x1024 at 60 as the max
supported resolution:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/382087-382087-64283-72270-444767-1130369.html
]

I'll continue to test Rawhide version of X and report when this changes.

tom
-- 
Tom London