Request for comments: Laptop improvements

[Adam Jackson]

Dave Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 06:13:12PM +0100, Dave Mitchell wrote:
>  > On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 05:59:59PM +0200, Phil Knirsch wrote:
>  > > Now, what i would like to ask of you is to give me some input on what 
>  > > you think might be something where we could do better on laptops.
>  > 
>  > 1) Make the window manager cope with the loss/gain of an external monitor.
> 
> AIUI, the problem here is that we have no way to know that has happened.
> We get no 'event' signal when things go away, and a vga cable is 'stateless'.
> so there's not even a way to poll the cable to see if anything is connected.

VGA cabling doesn't tell you when things are plugged in.  It probably 
could do by measuring impedance across pins, but no card I've seen 
supports notification for that.  DVI can give you an interrupt for this 
though.  Note how in OSX, DVI monitors are noticed immediately, but VGA 
monitors require a rescan.

Dynamic screen addition in anything other than clone mode requires major 
surgery to X.  Needed surgery, to be sure, but it's not small.

- ajax