Saturday, May 5, 2007

Oh hi, I upgraded ur screenz

Old dogs can learn new tricks. In this case the dog is my old Thinkpad X30 laptop and the trick is dual head output:

I've wanted to use this configuration since I got the laptop 3 years ago. I could never get the BIOS based driver to set it up and the new native-modesetting driver didn't work on the Intel 830 chipset that the laptop has. But with a little snooping around in the BIOS and some help from keithp and anholt it's now working - yay! And we're one step closer to being able to use the native modesetting intel driver by default in Fedora.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What's left before we can switch? Is it too late to have intel running by default in F7?

Thanks!

Kristian Høgsberg said...

FC7 is more or less done at this point, so it's too late for this kind of change. But we can probably switch first thing in the FC8 development cycle. We need to check how well it works on older chipsets like the i810 and i845, but we can realistically expect the driver to work across the entire range.

Jeremy said...

Note that we've already switched the default for all Mobility 9xx chips and all 945 and 965 chips.

Anonymous said...

Is this driver part of Xorg 7.2? Are you running different screen resolutions on the laptop LCD and the external monitor?

I have got a Sony Vaio with a i830 here, running Xorg 7.1, and I would love to use the dual head feature on this box.

Many thanks,

Holger

holger --at-- loomsday --dot-- co --dot-- nz

Kristian Høgsberg said...

Holger,

Some of the patches are upstream, some are still getting worked on. I know how to set up the digital video output controller for my laptop, but it may be different for your sony. You should try out the driver from the git repo here:

git://git.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel

and maybe try these patches if your laptop panel isn't scaled correctly:

http://people.freedesktop.org/~krh/ivch/

And you need a 1.3 xserver or so to acutally use the randr 1.2 features of the driver. Let us know how it works out, the best thing to do is to post your progress to the xorg-devel list.