Making Fedora work with laptops on docking station with external monitor

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2010-10-06 at 23:32 +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:

> What's the worst thing that can happen when trusting the ACPI lid state?
> 
> Think about this:
> 
> - Laptop lid open (so internal lvds enabled), and also external monitor connected.
> - lid state is wrong at boot, so it says lid closed.
> - Scripts check: "lid closed, external display enabled -> use only external monitor".
> 
> That gives you a working setup, you can login using the external display,
> and use the system perfectly fine. You can then manually enable the 
> internal lvds display, or possibly enable some workaround, 
> as you have a buggy laptop/driver/bios.
> 
> That doesn't sound bad at all.

However, it's not the worst case. The worst case is if someone has an
external monitor connected which they're not actually using (it may be
hidden or being used with some other input or just turned off). This
does happen:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=582525

that bug is already inconvenient for some people; if they have laptops
with bad lid switches it'd be much more inconvenient. The only active
display would be the external display they weren't actually using.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net