Hi Everyone, I have been playing with Fn+F5 video out toggling on my '901. I would guess that most of this applies equally to the smaller Eees. Assorted observations follow:
1. If the external monitor is attached when X starts, it chooses a size based on the DDC from the external monitor and the LCD just displays the top left corner (I don't think there's a way to pan this, is there?). This was surprising; I have no idea how to fix it. 2. Attempting to toggle when the XDM login screen is displayed doesn't work. My guess is that DISPLAY and/or XAUTHORITY is not being set correctly in this case. This could presumably be fixed in the scripts. (Where do errors from e.g. the xrandr command in the vga-toggle.sh script go to?) 3. The default script (well, the version that I have) sets the mode for the external monitor to 640x480, so only the top left portion of the screen is shown. Changing it to 1024x600 in /etc/default/eeepc-acpi-scripts fails because 1024x600 is not a mode that my external monitor advertises in its DDC. (In fact, I guess that very few if any monitors would advertise this mode; it's not one of the standard modes that needs only one bit of DDC data, and there's limited space in the DDC ROM for advertising non-standard modes.) However, I would be very surprised if there are any monitors made this millennium that would fail to display this mode if given it; at most you would need to press the "auto" button. And X already knows the timings for it because it's supplying it to the panel, so all that you need to do is xrandr --addmode VGA 1024x600 before the existing "xrandr --output VGA --mode" and it will just work. A minor snag is that the current split between /etc/acpi/actions/vga-toggle.sh and /etc/default/eeepci-acpi-scripts doesn't suit this configuration. 4. 1024x600 renders no worse than 640x480 on my 1600x1200 external monitor; however, the scaling that the monitor does does not look great. 1024x768 looks much better after scaling because it's the same scale factor in X and Y. But 1024x768 is better than the LCD. The solution is to use a 1024x600 "letter box" mode where there are 600 active lines and 168 blank lines, so that the monitor thinks it's 1024x768. I got this to work with the following: xrandr --newmode 1024x600LB 78.8 1024 1040 1136 1312 600 601 604 800 xrandr --addmode VGA 1024x600LB xrandr --output VGA --mode 1024x768LB That works, though it puts all the blank lines at the top of the image. For some reason my monitor didn't like it when I tried to put half the lines above and half below, but I may have mis-typed something. I'll have to get my scope out and try again. Presumably with some clever scripting you could cycle through all these various possibilities. Still to do: - I would be interested to hear from anyone with a widescreen monitor (e.g. 1440x900) who can try this. - Is there any way to use the native resolution of the external monitor and to show a scaled-down version on the Eee? - I am very keen to get external monitor switching working for the console. Also I'd like to get a 1024x600 console, which I think needs either a BIOS fix or some serious surgery in the intelfb driver. If anyone knows anything at all about this, _please_ get in touch! Cheers, Phil. _______________________________________________ Debian-eeepc-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-eeepc-devel
