Laptops and external VGA

From openSUSE

Configuration

If you want to connect your laptop to projectors using the external VGA plug, you just have to configure your secondary output:

1. Start sax2 (or start yast2 and click on Hardware/Graphics Card).
2. Enable Activate Dual Head Mode and click on Configure.
3. Make sure that Cloned Multihead is checked.
4. Select a monitor from the --> VESA or --> LCD vendor with 60Hz and the maximum resolution you want to drive the projector with (e.g. 1024x768@60Hz).
5. Select the same Second Monitor Resolution.
6. Press OK in both dialogs to accept your changes and let sax2 save your configuration.
7. Restart your Xserver (e.g. press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace)

You should now be able to plug in a projector in your external VGA plug and choose the right resolution e.g. with krandr.

Notes for NVIDIA

If you have installed NVIDIA proprietary drivers you can enable the external VGA output, sometimes without having to restart the X server:

1. Start nvidia-settings, you can run it as simple user, root privileges are not required if your system uses default configuration.
2. Select X Server Display Configuration from the left column, this will bring you to the homonym panel
3. If the desktop preview only shows one monitor click Detect Displays
4. Now you should have two monitors listed in the system, one is the laptop monitor (it will keep its own name) and the other the external adapter (it will probably have a lower resolution, likely 1024x768).
5. If you want the external VGA to duplicate your monitor display
   • configure both displays to use the same resolution; e.g. you reduce laptop's monitor resolution to 1024x768. You can do it from the panel: select the display you wish to modify by clicking on it in the preview or from the dropdown menu; then choose the resolution from the other dropdown menu.
   • Click on the Configure button and choose TwinView, when you click OK you may have to restart the X Server. Remember to apply your changes before restarting.
6. If you want to use separate displays
   • Click on Configure... and verify that Separate X Screen is actually selected, otherwise check it.
   • Apply you settings.

Caveats

There are a couple of possible issues:

• If your monitor is not detected correctly, you should switch to runlevel 3 with init 3 while working on a console, and start configuration with sax2 -r. Make sure that no monitor/projector is connected on the external VGA plug during this process.
• Only laptops with ATI, Intel, and NVidia chips will be supported.
• On laptops with Intel chips, up to and including SUSE Linux 10.1 only cloned setup is supported. There are no such restrictions with openSUSE 10.2.
• NVidia grapics chips:
  The open source driver nv does not support secondary outputs at all.
• ATI graphics chip, using open source driver (radeon):
  Using up to SUSE Linux 10.1, do not connect a monitor/projector to your external VGA while starting the computer or the Xserver, but plug in the projector only after startup. This issue is already solved in the driver based on current CVS code, so you might want to test the radeon10b driver (substitute radeon by radeon10b in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf), or openSUSE 10.2.
  On SL10.0 you might want to try the resolution in this bugzilla comment, using the CVS based driver. Note that these drivers might have other issues like missing support for X600.
• ATI graphics chip, using binary only driver (fglrx):
  Though not supported by SUSE, configuration in sax2 will most likely work. The driver does not have any issues with connected monitors during X startup.
  If you are using a laptop with high resolution display (e.g. 1600x1200), you might have to specify a lower resolution for the secondary output in order to be able to have 1024x768 be displayed correctly.
• Connecting the projector using an external DVI plug:
  In this case you most probably have to change /etc/X11/xorg.conf by hand.

Matthias 10:50, 15 November 2006 (UTC)