Making Fedora work with laptops on docking station with external monitor

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 07:31:54PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 7:28 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-10-05 at 19:20 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> >> On Tue, Oct 05, 2010 at 11:18:32AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> >>
> >> > don't we already have default behaviours based on the lid switch,
> >> > anyway? So why don't we have this problem with those? IIRC, we default
> >> > to suspending the system when the lid is closed on battery power - so
> >> > are we suspending people's systems at random, if those systems have
> >> > lying lid switches?
> >>
> >> Because we only do that on lid state transitions.
> >
> > So we could at least cover the case where you plug in an external
> > monitor, then close the lid? That would be better than nothing. I assume
> > the problem case is booting with the lid closed and an external monitor
> > connected.
> 
> The BIOS generally manages to get that one correct, can we not query
> and keep the current state on boot?
> 

Yep, BIOS gets it correct for me (HP laptop with radeon graphics).
For Fedora to get it correct it's enough for <some daemon> to check:

$ cat /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state
state:      closed

and then disable the internal LVDS, and enable external (connected) monitor.

-- Pasi