F17 External Monitor on 945GM

[David G. Miller]

Philippe LeCavalier <support <at> plecavalier.com> writes:

> 
> 
> On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 9:14 AM, Philippe LeCavalier <support <at>
plecavalier.com> wrote:
> Hi Everyone.
...
> A yes. The infamous Intel 945 chipset...I waded through the whole sluggish
feel issues of the >2048 res issue. Then an update appeared to have addressed
all my issues(no idea which one because the one that was supposed to fix it
didn't). 
...
> 
> So here are the symptoms: if I connect an external monitor(VGA) it won't light
up at all. My LCD flickers and comes back to it's original state. Fine. The
display settings reflect that one was connected and typically ids it properly.
Again, fine. I then set an appropriate resolution and placement for both and hit
apply. At this point the screen flickers again and my laptop comes back but the
monitor does nothing(orange light). I can however, bring my cursor passed the
LCD to where the monitor "is" but it's not lit so no joy there. If I let the
time run out on the dialog everything goes back to normal. No harm no foul. If I
play with any of the kbd combo keys to force the external monitor gnome-shell
freaks out and I'm forced to recover using the console. The only thing I can
successfully accomplish is Fn+F5 resulting in the external monitor only-type
setup. Recovering from that without restarting X is not possible. If I toggle
back to my LCD the screen flickers and spins. Same goes for disconnecting the
VGA cable. At this point I can't go back to the monitor either. I have no choice
but to open a console and restart Gnome-Shell. The odd time I can't even do that
and must power off(ouch! haven't had to do that in Linux for years)
> 

> -- Thanks,
> Phil
> 
> 
Hi Phil -

I had some similar problems with FC16 on an HP laptop with the i915 chip set.  X
still starts goofy with an external monitor attached but a simple:

xrandr --output VGA1 --left-of LVDS1

sorts out how much of the display should be on each monitor.  

The trivial oddity that I have is that, for some reason, this laptop monitor
always comes up at zero brightness.  Have you tried adjusting the screen
brightness on the laptop once everything is up?  I have to wait until X is up
for this to work.  The text output from booting goes to the external monitor and
I can pound on the laptop's screen brightness key and nothing happens.  After X
starts, it behaves as expected.  This drove me nuts getting FC16 working since
there weren't any errors; just no display.

I'm running FC16 from a bootable, external hard disk.  The i915 laptop is in my
office and I have an older HP laptop with an ATI chipset at home.  I boot the
home laptop from the external hard disk and the display is duplicated until X
starts and then I get the same slightly goofy overlap I see on my work laptop. 
A slightly different xrandr (xrandr --output VGA-0 --left-of LVDS) sorts out
those displays.

A couple of other suggestions are to turn off graphical boot and quiet mode so
you can see what's going on as the system boots.  Also, switch to booting in the
equivalent to runlevel 3 (multiuser target) and then start X from the command
line with startx.

Cheers,
Dave