Making Fedora work with laptops on docking station with external monitor

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2010-10-07 at 10:49 +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:

> > 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.
> 
> I read that bugzilla as it's a driver bug.. so it'll get fixed at some point.

Not really; the driver isn't able to detect if connected monitors are
turned on. It's not clear if this is really *theoretically* possible,
which is why the report's been closed. And it doesn't cover the case
where a connected monitor is powered on but not actually being used for
the computer.

> We should define "policy" based on wanted behaviour, not based on various
> bugs out there.. Bugs need to be fixed, and then the policy works like it's expected.

In theory, yeah, but in practice, we can't take this to extremes if it
means we wind up with people staring at blank screens with no apparent
explanation.

> atm we're lacking a policy regarding these laptop lid/dock things.
> Ie. there's no daemon/script even trying to do the right thing..
> 
> (drm/kms driver guys have made it clear the "policy" has to be decided and
> set up by userspace).
> 
> For the "transition period" we could have a boot/grub menu item 
> that automatically enables the "old behaviour" for people who have
> hardware with buggy bios/drivers. Just like we have the "safe (vesa) graphics" 
> boot option on install CDs.
> 
> Does this make sense?

No, not really, parameters aren't magic, they can only do things if the
drivers / userspace utilities are written with these parameters in mind.
I don't believe there's any such framework at present, and besides, we
want to have *fewer* icky bootloader menu workarounds, really, not more.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net