Attaching a monitor to a laptop.

James Mckenzie jjmckenzie51 at earthlink.net
Fri Feb 4 18:01:18 UTC 2005


-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Ruffo <nick_ruffo at yahoo.com>
Sent: Feb 4, 2005 10:36 AM
To: fedora-list at redhat.com
Subject: Attaching a monitor to a laptop.

I am trying to attach my LCD monitor to my laptop
using SuSE 9.2 but the function keys on my laptop do
not work so I can't switch to the external VGA port. I
am using a Dell 700m. I am in the process of
installing Fedora 3 is it possible to get this to work
with Fedora?

-----James' Reply to Rick------


If you are using ACPI(d), you can build custom events and actions to take on those events.

I have an IBM thinkpad and it creates special keycodes, even without the ibm-acpi driver for the function keys.  What I did was to 'tail -f acpid' in the /var/log directory and see what keycode was generated when I pressed the appropriate function key for swapping from internal to external monitor.  Then I built a configuration file based upon the sample.conf file in the /etc/acpi/events directory that would activate when I pressed the function key.  Out of sense, I named the .conf file for the function key press that causes the event.  In the action= parameter in the .conf file I put:
event=<keypress that was captured in the acpid file>
action=sh /etc/acpi/actions/screenswap.sh

In the /etc/acpi/actions/screenswap.sh file I put in the commands needed to swap screens from the internal LCD panel to external CRT.  This will vary based upon your system setup.

Hopefully this will help get the interna/external problem solved.

-- 


James McKenzie
A Proud User of Linux!




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