[Gllug] Change the primary monitor for xorg and the console

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 06:12:36PM +0100, Tom Weissmann wrote:
> I bought a new monitor yesterday because my "lap"-top has no screen and 
> I was sick of using a 1024x768 CRT.
> 
> I discovered a couple of interesting facts. The first being, it's really 
> really irritating not having a text console. If anything goes wrong at 
> boot time there's not much I can do about it. Is there any way, perhaps 
> configuring the framebuffer, that I can get output on the external 
> monitor before X starts?

On IBM thinkpads there's an option in the BIOS to tell it whether to
send the video signal to the built-in LCD, or external VGA or both
at boot time. You're kinda doomed if you can't see the BIOS though :-(
Depending on the ACPI support you might be able to cat magic value
into a file under /proc/acpi/video/ to change which output is active
which should affect both text/framebuffer and X unless X is configured
explicitly.

Dan.
-- 
|=-            GPG key: http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt       -=|
|=-       Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-           Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug