On 08/01/2012 11:33 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
On 08/01/12 9:21 PM, Rob Kampen wrote:
just wondering which driver I need to be looking at / for that deals with the laptop's external video connector.
the video hardware driver
Background - went to deliver a presentation last week and found that there was no way to get any video output to the external D-15 connector (hooked up to a video projector). Eventually I re-booted to windoze 7 and all worked just fine - major embarrassment after telling everyone how great Linux was.
The laptop has a nvidia GTX 460M card and I use the el-repo kmod-nvidia-295.59-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64 and nvidia-x11-drv-295.59-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64
I do have compiz-0.8.2-24.el6.x86_64 and compiz-gnome-0.8.2-24.el6.x86_64 running but as these should not be dealing directly with the hardware am not thinking they should matter.
Not sure where to start trouble shooting - I tried lots of different screen resolutions via the System > Preferences > Display but no joy getting any signal out to the external connector. This laptop does have an hdmi socket but I was not using that, I thought the good old fashioned D-15 video plug should "just work" (tm).
The function key <Fn> <F8> did toggle the laptop screen off and on and varied the resolution of the laptop display but never any output on the external connector.
those laptop graphics chips treat the VGA connector like a 2nd monitor, I have no idea how you configure linux for multimonitor, but I know its not nearly as easy as MS Windows where it just works.
Indeed that connector is treated as an "all the time on" 2nd monitor
If it is an nvidia card, you can use use the NVIDIA X Server Settings link in "Menu => System => Administration" (if you install the drivers from elrepo, which I recommend)
If it is another card that uses system drivers, you can use the "Menu => System => Display"
I just create 2 xorg.conf files and copy the one I need into place when I hook up to my docking station on my Dell M4500.