Fn-F8 switches from the laptop LCD to an external monitor on my computer (Dell Inspiron 1150). When I used Fedora Core 2 (xorg-x11-6.7.0-11.i386.rpm), this worked reasonably well - it would switch, but there would be strange lines at the top of the screen, but ctrl-alt-backspace fixed things nicely. In Fedora Core 3, this fails completely. It tries to start up the monitor (i.e. the led on the monitor goes green), but then it fails after a bit. Switching does work, however, from a virtual terminal. And I can start the machine and immediately switch to the external monitor during grub and it will boot fine in the external monitor, but then I cannot switch back to the LCD. Fedora Core 3 uses xorg-x11-6.8.1-12.FC3.21. I have also found a userspace program that can turn the external monitor on and off - perhaps this will be useful in fixing the problem. The program is called i810switch (http://vorlon.cwru.edu/~ames/i810switch/). RPMs for this program have been accepted into Fedora Extras (in case any developer uses that).
you may need the monitorlayout option to force on the outputs. Option "MonitorLayout" "LFP, CRT" or Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT, LFP" depending on how your bios sets up the displays. see the i810 man page.
Thanks. Adding: Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT, LFP" to my xorg.conf helped quite a bit. Now, Fn+F8 will switch from Laptop LCD to CRT. Pressing Fn+F8 again switches back to LCD, but it also places a screwed up version of the screen on the CRT (funny lines at the top and the rest of the screen is shifted down). Pressing Fn+F8 a third time brings me back to CRT only. There is no way to get both working at the same time correctly or get back to just LCD. i810switch continues to be able to turn CRT on and off, but the CRT only appears correctly if I have not pressed Fn+F8 previously. Also, X functions independently of the virtual terminals, but they interfere with each other. If I am using CRT and then I switch to a virtual terminal, it will appear on the LCD (pressing Fn+F8 will bring the virtual terminal to the CRT, however). If I then return to X, X will always appear on the CRT, forcing me to press Fn+F8 again, which is a pain as I also use an external keyboard that does not have an Fn key. While the combination of i810switch and the extra option in xorg.conf makes for a useable system, it would be nice not to have these minor annoyances. Is there any way to make it so that: 1) Fn+F8 cycles normally through LCD,CRT,LCD+CRT,LCD...? 2) Virtual terminals and X appear on the same screen and switching from one to the other does not affect where they appear? Thanks again.
> If I then return to X, X will always appear on the CRT, forcing I meant to say LCD here.
Created attachment 1845 [details] New driver David, try this new driver and post a new log file if things still aren't quite right.
I tried the new driver and it had, as far as I can tell, the same behavior as the original driver I had installed. I also noticed that sometimes the mouse pointer will disappear from one or the other screen, but switching back and forth appears to fix that. I will attach my x logs shortly.
Created attachment 1852 [details] Xorg.log when using the new driver
I'm a little confused here. Are you running dual head, or just single head and switching with Fn-F8 ?? It certainly seems to say that you are running the latter with the output I've seen. I'm also surprised that using MonitorLayout has affected things the way they have, it shouldn't.
Actually, scratch that about MonitorLayout, I need to re-read my own code ;-)
Created attachment 1856 [details] Another test driver Another driver to try. Can you post a new log with this too ?
Comment on attachment 1856 [details] Another test driver Wrong one - deleting.
Created attachment 1857 [details] Another driver Another driver to try, that last one didn't upload correctly.
OK, the last driver was an improvement. Fn+F8 now switches cleanly between external monitor and LCD and back. Some problems still persist. There is no Fn+F8 way to get both monitors working at the same time. i810switch can do this for me, though. Also, switching to a virtual terminal moves back to the LCD. If I then switch back to X (i.e. ctrl-alt-F7), it will go to the LCD regardless of what it was on before. While the virtual terminals aren't running X, and therefore, it isn't an X problem necessarily, it is strange that it forgets what monitor it was on. I will attach a log soon. And thanks for your speedy help.
I actually thought of the forgetfulness after I sent the driver. I can fix that. But I'd like a log of you switching between the LCD, CRT and CRT+LCD to capture that in the logfile.
I am having trouble with attachments - it keeps giving me an error. Instead, the log file is at the following web site: http://erizo.ucdavis.edu/~dmk/Xorg.0.log I did a number of different switches in that log, at least one of each type. The CRT+LCD were done with i810switch.
Mmm, from that log file it's telling me that your machine is only trying to switch between LCD and CRT and never tries to set both at once when pressing Fn-F8. Is there something in the BIOS that might change this ? Have you checked your running the latest BIOS ?
Yes, I am running the latest bios and there does not appear to be anything in the bios directly related to the video card. In windows, I believe I gave it a shot and it did do both, but it has been a while. Oh, and the latest driver fixes the forgetfullness problem. Virtual terminals still appear in the LCD (but can easily be switched), but X will always appear where it was set to. I also noticed that logging out makes the screen go back to the LCD. As logging out kills X, it might be hard to fix this though. Not that big a deal as FnF8 gets me back to the CRT.
The Xserver will always restore what it was set to. So it's going to back to the console from how it started. Not much I can do about that without adding an option to the driver to force that behaviour. At the moment, I'm not sure what I can do about Fn-F8 to get both displays for you as the machine isn't doing the right thing to do it. There might be, again, some specific option I could add to force this kind of behaviour though.
Well, the current behavior is a definite improvement. Perhaps in windows they are somehow taking over Fn+F8 and forcing it to do the appropriate thing, but checking that is probably out of my league. I will check in windows that it does actually do both - if it doesn't then at least we can be pretty sure it is not a linux problem. Now I want to go back to redhat and ask them to update their display configuration software. I have a couple of questions though. One is how important the MonitorLayout option was to this working? I can see configuration problems with this in that any configuration software will have to automatically to determine how many pipes there are and what order they should be in. What are your thoughts? The other question is when the improvements to i810_drv will be available in the standard X distribution? Thanks again.
MonitorLayout was a requirement before, but you should find that you can remove it now with the new driver and it should still work. The driver improvements will definately be put back into the X CVS.
I confirmed that switching works without the monitorlayout option. Wow, a bug that actually got fixed. I am almost teary eyed. Perhaps I should find more X bugs and fewer Fedora bugs :) Thanks again.
By the way, redhat recommended that I: > You may also want to consider recommending X.Org to > backport the fix to 6.8.x also, and suggest it as a candidate for > XORG-6_8-branch for future stable updates. Is this the correct place to recommend that backport, or should I go somewhere else? Thanks.
Created attachment 1880 [details] Latest version of Alan's driver with CRT+LCD working This is the latest version of Alan's driver that has LCD,CRT, and LCD+CRT working great on my machine.
There are many other fixes that are on the trunk that should certainly make 6.8.3. This bug was only opened because I thought it could be included in 6.8.2 and stop people from suffering.
Ignore that last comment. Wrong bug.
Can you try downloading the latest driver from http://www.fairlite.demon.co.uk/intel.html and see if everything still works for you ? If so, I'll close this bug.
Works like a charm. Thanks for all your hard work - now I can make presentations with my laptop with Linux.
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