intel driver and dual screen

[Dan Williams]

On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 11:00 -0500, Kristian Høgsberg wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 09:14 -0500, Simo Sorce wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 12:52 +0100, Valent Turkovic wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > when I connect external LCD monitor to my laptop's VGA connector I get
> > > image on both monitors with the "same" resolution - just that the one
> > > on the laptop is cropped.
> > > Laptop supports 1280x800 and LCD 1280x1024 so I see the same desktop
> > > on both screens just I don't see the bottom part on laptop screen.
> > > 
> > > I would like to have an option to do two things:
> > > 1. to turn off the laptop screen when I'm using only the external one.
> > > (I have vista on this laptop also but I don't use it - under vista I
> > > can use FN+F4 to rotate video modes and in one video mode only
> > > external LCD is on, under Fedora 8 FN+F4 does nothing)
> > > 2. ability to switch both screens on but not in mirror mode but in
> > > dual screen mode.
> > > 
> > > I'm using Fedora 8 with latest updates and with intel 2.1.1 driver.
> > > 
> > > Are there any intel utilities that make managing video setup easier?
> > > Can you please point me to some web resources that address issues I
> > > mentioned.
> > > 
> > > Thank you in advance,
> > > Valent.
> > 
> > I have exactly the same situation, I have a xrandr command I start from
> > my session that sets up the dual screen thing:
> > 
> > xrandr --output VGA --right-of LVDS
> 
> One things that's not very well documented is that you need to tweak you
> xorg.conf for this to work.  You need to add a Virtual line to the
> "Display" subsection in the "Screen" section of the xorg.conf file, for
> example:
> 
> Section "Screen"
>         Identifier "Screen0"
>         Device     "Videocard0"
>         DefaultDepth     24
>         SubSection "Display"
>                 Viewport   0 0
>                 Depth     24
>                 Virtual   3600 1200
>         EndSubSection
> EndSection
> 
> The exact resolution depends on the monitors you want to use, but it has
> to be big enough to hold both side by side.  In my case, I have
> 1900x1200 and 1680x1050 monitors side by side, which gives me the
> numbers above.

Can that eventually be allocated dynamically or adjusted when the
hotplug events come in?  Because this leads to the problem where X will
just plain fail to bring up the new hotplugged 27" Apple Cinema display
that I just got because I need some random obscure option in the X
config.  Hopefully this option will just Go Away (TM) too in the next
few releases?

Dan