Here are my laptop’s specs:
Dell Inspiron 9300
2.0 GHz Pentium M processor
1 GB RAM
100 GB hard drive
ATI Mobility Radeon X300
Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG
External monitor owned: Dell 1901FP
I migrated to OpenSUSE 11.0 from Kubuntu 8.04 a few days ago, hoping that OpenSUSE would be able to recognize the Fn-F8 key, which would allow me to switch between my laptop’s built-in display and an external monitor. Unfortunately, it was the same results as in Kubuntu: it just doesn’t work. The external monitor simply cloned what the original laptop display was showing, except that the resolution was set to that of the laptop display, so parts of the display was cropped in the external monitor, requiring the screen to scroll around. I tried enabling Dual Head Mode in YaST, but it didn’t do anything at all to help with my situation. I tried to set the resolution of the external monitor to 1280x1024, but during the testing of the config, the monitor reported that it cannot display anything in that video mode (the laptop’s display did work fine, though).
However, I do remember Googling around for solutions to this while I was using Kubuntu, and found this ad-hoc bash script that managed to do the trick, but it had two problems: it required root permissions to run, and it has “kludge” written all over it. (Output Switcher - Easy Linux Screen Management « On the Road : Victoria J.K. Lamburn’s Blog) In addition, it required me to manually map Fn-F8 to run the script, which seems to be a problem in OpenSUSE because xev doesn’t even report the key when I press it.
So that about sums it up for my video woes. Can anybody give me any suggestions to make it work without having to resort to that kludgy script? Any ideas would be appreciated.
Edit: Thought of another reason why the script isn’t that great: it requires me to edit my xorg.conf file and do some math involving the sums of the resolutions of both displays. The problem with that is that it is NOT adaptable to other types of displays that have different resolutions (technically it is, but it requires a lot of work for something that works really well out of the box in Windows XP).