[Wylug-help] Laptop External Display

[Smylers]

Mark Randall writes:

> I'm not running Ubuntu at the moment - but I have a suspicion that the
> resolution that your laptop screen is set to is incompatible with the
> external display

That's entirely possible.  If having decent output on both displays
isn't possible I'd settle for the external display being good and the
laptop display being the one that's shimmering, cos then only I have to
put up with it.

Though the other thing I forgot to mention before is that I have
previously had both displays working properly on this laptop:

* Almost 3 years ago it was running whichever Fedora was current at the
  time (FC4 maybe?).  Fn+F8 yielded very bad output, but everything
  worked with the i810switch program.

* When running Ubuntu 6.06 the i810switch program gave the same output
  as now (external display always wiggles), but Fn+F8 behaved itself.

Of course the projectors I was using in each of those situations are
different from the external displays I'm trying now (and from each
other), so I don't know if the different behaviour is because of
hardware or software changes.

> - perhaps you could press Fn+F8 once (so the display is correct) and
> then change the resolution to the resolution you usually have on your
> laptop

How do I do that?  I don't remember ever specifying a resolution; I
think it just auto-detected and gave me something plausible.  Oh, and
how do I find out what my current resolution is?

> With regard to running two different displays - I think you need two
> graphics cards to achieve this, so the answer is no.

That's what I suspected.  I've seen laptops running Windows with
different things on each display (such as the current PowerPoint slide
on the external display and an overview of the entire presentation on
the laptop screen) but didn't know how many graphics cards they had in.

Thanks for your help.  And sorry for so many further questions!

Smylers