[Wylug-help] Laptop External Display

[Smylers]

Aaron Crane writes:

> Smylers writes:
> 
> > Mark Randall writes:
> > 
> > > 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 don't think that's so ...  Googling for "i810 dual-head" (without
> quotes) suggests that at least some people have managed it in at least
> some situations.

Thanks.  It sounds like Xinerama can be used for this.  Unfortunately I
couldn't get it working.

I initially tried following the instructions at:

  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=221174
  http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1773624

But that yielded the following error:

  (EE) I810(0) No video BIOS modes for chosen depth
  (EE) I810(1) Failed to setup second head due to primary head failure

which puzzled me, because screen 0 was the built-in laptop screen and I
hadn't changed anything to do with modes or depth, leaving them at
exactly the settings which worked for that screen on its own.

For what it's worth the error message displayed in a text console on the
external monitor; the laptop screen was blank.  (And it looked like an
attempt to create dialogue boxes with line characters except the
encoding was wrong and so sundry accented letters and other symbols
provided the border instead.)

Repeated pressing of Fn+F8 would toggle through various states, one of
which had the text console error emssage appearing on the laptop screen
and the external LCD monitor telling me that it could display the
supplied input signal, and that its optimum display is 1280x1024.

Somewhere in passing I'd read somebody claiming success with each of
i810 with Xinerama and i810 with DRI, but failure at getting all 3 of
them working together.  I'm not entirely sure what DRI is, but I don't
think I need it, so I tried commenting out this line, in the Modules
section, to see if it helped:

  Load    "dri"

It didn't.

i810(4) says:

  By default 8 Megabytes of system memory are used for graphics.  For
  the 830M  and later, the default is 8 Megabytes when DRI is not
  enabled and 32 Megabytes with DRI is enabled.  This amount may be
  changed with  the VideoRam entry in the config file Device section.

I wondered if the 'chosen depth' error could be that not enough memory
for two screens' worth of content, so I put:

  VideoRam 65536

in the Device sections, but that didn't help either.

And I noticed that the output of lspci includes both of these lines:

  00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM
  Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02)

  00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated
  Graphics Device (rev 02)

So rather than having both Device-s with a BusID of PCI:0:2:0 I tried
changing one of them to PCI:0:2:1, but that didn't work either.

As you can probably tell I'm way out of my depth here, and by this point
I've run out of things to try randomly changing on the off-chance they
help.

Does anybody have any suggestions of what I else I can try?  Or is able
to elucidate on the 'no bios modes' error message?

Thanks very much.

Smylers