Dell Latitude E6410 muiple monitors using docking station

English Hardware
#1

I am using Dell Latitude E6410 with a docking station which provides external monitor, USB and audio I/O ports. I am using openSuse 12.1 with KDE. My graphics card as listed by lspci is:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

The external monitor connected works fine, but the laptop’s own LCD display remains off. Even KDE doesn’t detect it. I want to use laptop’s monitor as another KDE virtual desktop. How can I do so?

#2

So, after the boot is complete you have to turn the internal LCD on with the normal Dell Fn Keys and then you may need to do a Ctrl-Alt-F2 and then a Ctrl-Alt-F7 for instance so that KDE will find it as I recall.

Thank You,

#3

The Dell Fn key to brin LCD monitor to power doesn’t work.

#4

And have you tried using Ctrl-Alt-F2 and then a Ctrl-Alt-F7 in KDE?

Thank You,

#5

Yes I tried this. Ctrl-Alt-F2 takes me to console and Ctrl-Alt-F7 takes me back to KDE on the external monitor.

Here is a screen-shot of KDE display settings, obviously the identified output is he external output. I checked the back panel of monitor and it is connected using DVI connector.

imgur: the simple image sharer

http://imgur.com/SdhlY

#6

I also use an E6410 in an environment that’s very similar…

When you’re unplugged from the docking station, what is your LCD screen identified as? eDP1?

Do you know which model of docking station you have?

C.Durbin

#7

When not plugged in to the docking station my LCD monitor is recognized as: eDP1

The docking station’s model number is: PR 03X

Sorry for the late reply.

#8

Hi,

I had a Dell Latitude E6410. I never used the KDE tools or the Fn buttons for multiple monitors, I always used the nvidia tools. Did you install the nividia driver?

Best wishes

Michael

#9

Sorry, I haven’t seen that you mentioned intel graphics.

Are there variants of the Dell Latitude E6410 with an intel graphics controller?
My one had a Nvidia quadro NVS3100M.

Michael

#10

My setup is an E6410 with 2 Dell 1908 monitors attached to my docking station. If I used the tools in KDE to set the monitors up,
the internal screen wouldn’t turn on when undocked. So after doing some searching on-line I found a small bash script that set
different monitor configs via xrandr. I modified it for use for my particular instance, but I think it may work for you as well.
Basically what it does is if it detects HDMI1 then it turns on HDMI2 and sets its position to the right of HDMI1. If it doesn’t detect
HDMI1, it turns on eDP1 and turns off HDMI1 and HDMI2 (technically it probably doesn’t need to do that). I have it run automatically
at login and it seems to work very well. Hope it helps!

#!/bin/bash
# If an external monitor is connected, place it with xrandr
# External output may be "VGA" or "VGA-0" or "DVI-0" or "TMDS-1" or "HDMIx" 
# Look in KDE monitor config to find the names of detected screens
EXTERNAL_OUTPUT1="HDMI1"
EXTERNAL_OUTPUT2="HDMI2"
INTERNAL_OUTPUT="eDP1"
# possible locations
# --left-of --right-of --above --below 
xrandr |grep $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT1 | grep " connected "
if  $? -eq 0 ]; then
    # If HDMI1 is connected then activate both external monitors and turn off internal
    xrandr --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT1 --auto --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT2 --auto --right-of $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT1 --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --off   
else
    # Didn't see HDMI1 connected, so turn off both external monitors and turn on the internal one.
    xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT1 --off --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT2 --off
fi

C.Durbin

#11

Original script location:

Xorg RandR 1.2 - ThinkWiki

C.Durbin

#12

I tried the script and I lost the display on both the monitors. The problem is that my other display is not at all detected.

#13

My friend is using the Ubuntu 11.10 with the same laptop model and docking station and both monitors work perfectly fine for him. To me now it looks like openSuse uses inappropriate drivers for my graphics card. How can I use Ubuntu’s driver for my laptop without breaking the package system.

#14

I used Ubuntu 11.10 Live CD to boot and it worked fine. Then I got the trick and tried my openSuse with external monitor connected to the dock turned on and kept the laptop lid open so that its also on. This way both the monitors were detected and I could set the settings from KDE display to not to clone the display but to put them side by side. It looks there is problem with the drivers so that if laptop of the monitors is turned one during startup it will go undetected later.

The dual monitor setup was cool. Here is my experience:

  • The 4 virtual desktops on one monitor and 4 on other.
  • I could set up two wallpapers for two screens.
  • However the virtual desktops for both screens were mapped one to one. If I switch to desktop grid on one screen it would show desktop grid on another monitor. And if I switch to virtual desktop one on one screen it switches to virtual desktop 1 on another screen. And the virtual desktops were kinda extended across the screens.
  • Moving windows across virtual-desktop/screen worked great. While in desktop grid mode I could move window from virtual desktop 1 screen 1 to virtual desktop 3 screen 2 easily.
  • The plasma taskbar was also movable across screen, which looked so cool.
  • I think the semantics of virtual desktops and multiple screens is not so much worked upon and it can be made more intuitive.

Then I switched off my machine and a little while later I used it it with just the laptop monitor. The effects were disastrous. KDE still behaved as if with two monitor. I saw two different wallpapers over one another with one one of them visible at the left edge. Taskbar was missing. Desktop icons were missing. I deleted the kwinrc file and even lost the capability to show windows on screen. Even krunner was showing up and disappearing. Alt-tab would show the applications open but I couldn’t switch to them.
I deleted all plasma config files and kwin config files and then it worked fine.

The solution I think is that when in dual/multiple monitor mode KDE should use separate configuration and when in single monitor mode use another configuration. When more/lesser monitors are there try to create new configurations accordingly. The customizations like adding/removing plasma applets, wallpaper change can be mapped to other configurations while user is is in one of the configurations.