Single or Dual head for laptop, Xwrapper ?

[Karl Hegbloom]

On Mon, 2005-05-16 at 12:54 +1000, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 04:45:14PM -0700, Karl Hegbloom wrote:
> > Had and idea... what if at boot, you use 'e' to edit the boot command,
> > and add 'X11Layout=projector1024x768' or some such, and that made the
> > Xwrapper launch the X server use a '-layout' configuration that
> > includes a projector screen on the VGA port?
>
> This is stunningly out of the scope of Xwrapper, and far out of the
> scope of gdm and friends.  What you're really asking here is for hotplug
> device support and automatic configuration in X, which is so far out of
> bountyville that it's not funny.  It'll happen, eventually.

Please explain why it is "out of the scope" of Xwrapper, so that I do
not make that mistake in the future.

What program is it in the scope of?  What I want is to be able to have
the X server started with a '-layout' option when a kernel boot
parameter is added, for booting a laptop to a mode where a projector or
external VGA monitor works.

When I looked at how things are set up, I found no way within GDM to do
that.  It's scripts all run after the X server is started.  Then I
looked at how the X server is run.  It is run via Xwrapper.  That seemed
to me to be where such a thing might go.

Do you have any better ideas?  It would be nice to have it work without
needing to wrap the server startup in a script...

I guess the easiest thing to do is drop in an init.d script that changes
a symlink to an xorg.conf.  But I'd rather have both configurations in
there --- LCD only and LCD + VGA --- and choose the layout using the
'-layout' switch to Xorg.

-- 
Karl Hegbloom <hegbloom at pdx.edu>