Making Fedora work with laptops on docking station with external monitor

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 02:05:34PM +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 09:43:22PM +0200, Dan Horák wrote:
> > Pasi Kärkkäinen píše v ??t 07. 10. 2010 v 22:29 +0300: 
> > > On Thu, Oct 07, 2010 at 10:17:11AM -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > > 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.
> > > > 
> > > 
> > > Hmm... things seem to work always ok on Windows, so it should be possible..
> > 
> > And I dare to call the recent behaviour a regression, because IIRC it
> > worked well until one (not identified) update in F-12.
> > 
> > 
> 
> Also it would be perfectly ok if I could enable "trust_acpi_lid_state" option
> somewhere (since I know it works on my laptop), but today we don't have a 
> daemon/tool/script to handle laptop lids..
> 
> So we're not even trying to do the right thing..
> 

I was asking about the "monitor connected but turned off" thing
on dri-devel, and the reply was that it's impossible to detect
if the display is turned on or off. Displays are designed
to always send the EDID info, no difference if they're on or off.

So.. we can't detect that. And others can't either.

What we need is a daemon/tool/script that monitors the
ACPI LID state and enables/disables the internal LVDS based on that,
and also enables/disables the external monitors based on their "connected" status.

If the external monitor is connected but turned off then 
the user just has to turn the monitor on to see the content. 

The bigger problem was the laptop LID thing, and this solution
fixes that. (bugs in acpi drivers or hardware aside).

A couple of possible scenarios:

- Laptop lid closed, external monitor connected and on -> only external display should be enabled.
- Laptop lid closed, external monitor connected but off -> only external display should be enabled.

- Laptop lid open, external monitor connected and on -> both internal lvds and external display should be enabled.
- Laptop lid open, external monitor connected but off -> both internal lvds and external display should be enabled.

- Laptop lid open, no external monitor connected -> only internal lvds should be enabled. 
- Laptop lid closed, no external monitor connected -> what to do here?


-- Pasi