Connecting External Monitor to Acer Notebook

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday, 1 March 2006 07:09, Arjun Shankar wrote:
> > I have an Acer TravelMate 4000NLCi (855GME board), and an LG
> > Studioworks 500G (15") monitor. Well, I signed up for a
> > "LaptopTestingTeam" page for my notebook. On that page, it says
> > that normally, i just need to plug in my external monitor, and
> > push the display switch on my notebook for the monitor to work.
> > That is not happening. Do I need to edit xorg.conf, or is there
> > an easier way? In any case, how do I get it to work? And is it
> > normally supposed to be as easy to plug in and push the button?
> > Thanks in advance!
> > Arjun Shankar
>
> Well, I got a tarball from the following link and followed
> instructions. It is a driver for running the external monitor in
> conjunction with the LCD screen, for an 855GM board. Following the
> instructions in the README got me a working monitor. However, the
> display quality was bad. However it might help someone else (unless
> I am doing something completely useless, because there is a better
> way. I have been using linux for a while now, but never been
> bothered too much with getting my systerm to 'just work' until now.
> Any ideas?)

In practice its not that easy. When X.org starts it asks the card and 
monitor for their specs (using DDC) and selects the best resolution 
settings based on that info, and any instructions you put in 
xorg.conf

There's many variations on how the laptop hardware does the switch: 
some simply take the video card output and switch it between the 
internal monitor and the external port. Sometimes there's a 3rd 
setting for both - most useful. There are other possibilities, 
including two independant video cards, one card with two independant 
outputs, etc, etc.

When you switch outputs, X.org doesn't know about the change, and 
continues using settings for the internal monitor. This might not 
suit the external one. You don't describe the badness on the LG, but 
I'd guess the laptop has a native resolution of say 1024x768 and the 
LG is say 1280x960. Running LCDs at the wrong resolution looks awful.

If I had copies of your xorg.conf and Xorg.0.log I might be able to 
give more specific help

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five