notebook / multiple visual displays - activation and control

[Jesse Barnes]

On Monday, March 31, 2008 10:48 am Tom London wrote:
> Uhh....  not sure I understand what you mean.
>
> I have tested only 2 "use cases":
> 1. boot laptop with no external monitor (just builtin LCD).  This works
> fine.
>
> 2. boot laptop with internal monitor "shut" and system connected to
> external monitors. This goes through what seems to me to be a "funny"
> boot sequence:
>     a. gdmgreeter comes up in 1024x768
>     b. after presenting password, display "re-sizes" to 1280x1024 (per
> display "info" buttons"), but the screen shows a "tiled" version of
> the "blue curve" background (I get one complete copy in the upper left
> corner, partial tiles in the other 3 "slots").
>     c. after a few more seconds, the tiling vanishes, but I briefly
> get a "deformed" background (for about 5 seconds).
>    d. background becomes normal, any my startup windows appear;
>    e. "xdpyinfo" says the dimension is 1920x1024, as does "xrandr".
> Some displays are all messed up (e.g., firefox)
>    f. running "xrandr --size 1280x1024" repairs.  gnome-terminal
> windows actually don't change, but the messed up ones now are fixed.
>
> Use case 2 behaves exactly the same if I boot directly to X (via
> startx) instead of gdm.
>
> I've logged this all here:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=437654
>
> Not sure why I'm the only lucky one ;)  Any hints/fixes gladly welcome.

Ok, I was just trying to figure out if you also had problems hotplugging 
displays (i.e. booting with nothing attached, then trying to plug in & enable 
an external display); sounds like you're only complaining about the "boot up 
with VGA connected" case here though.

I think there are at least a couple of problems:
  1) we don't do lid switch detection very well in the Intel driver
     this will cause X to enable both screens at boot time, picking a bad
     default
  2) the X "pick a default configuration" mode isn't very good
     for one thing, it tries to clone the displays instead of setting up
     an extended desktop, but beyond that the cloned configuration often
     isn't what you want.  I think this is what ajax fixed (and he's working
     on (1) also, unfortunately that's a hard problem).

Jesse