Following the problems I experienced in Stuttgart with the laptop’s output, I decided to spend some time today trying to fix it. To be honest I was rather too tired to do anything more involved after getting up rather early to head home!

The log file is your friend when doing this, though it does have a lot of information in it. I found mine in /var/log/Xorg.o.log, but as the server starts it’ll tell you where the log is.

Reading the man page for the i810 driver was useful and confirmed some of the settings I’d seen in other people’s xorg.conf files on the web. Initial results gave some strange results…

The card has 2 pipes, pipe A is the external VGA port and pipe B is the LCD screen.

VBERestore did horrible things to my display when enabled (it’s off by default).
ModuleLayout always takes 2 arguments, “PIPE A, PIPE B”. Given that pipe B is always the
LCD and the logfile identifies it as an LFP device I used “CRT,LFP”. NB you CANNOT have spces in this string as otherwise it will report errors and not use the settings (warning of invalid mode being selected)!

With Xinerama turned on I had one screen that spawned teh 2 monitors (as expected). This seemed to work OK, but wasn’t what I wanted.

Commenting out the Xinerama setting gave me the same huge screen, but instead of a “single” screen I had another screen next to the first, but again I could simply move the mouse from one to the other.

Adding the option “Clone” “yes” and then removing the details for Screen 1 actually did manage to get me a clone of the screen, but the Fn + F7 button didn’t cycle through the displays as I’d hoped it would allow me to (I could only turn off the LCD not the external as I’d hoiped to be able to).