Re Monitor Help

Hi Guys,

Right I new to linux, but i’ve installed suse 11.2 on an Acer laptop with Gnome 2.28 without any hicups. Everything working. External Harrdrive, USB Mouse & Keyboard. So been playing about with it and installed a Mac Theme which worked.

Now I thought i’d start using the laptop through my Hannon 25 inch monitor, but i pluged it in set it to not display on the laptop only on the monitor and the monitor jsut displays wavy lines. Which i think is because it doesn’t have the drivers for the monitor?

Any help would be much apprecaited

Thanks

Its probably got more to do with your graphics chipset and/or driver. Open a console, and with your monitor plugged in, do

xrandr

What gets reported?

You can get more info about your hardware with this command:

/sbin/lspci -nnk

This info may help others to assist. BTW, what type of connection does the external monitor use?

Luminosity@linux-f58i:~> xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 2048 x 2048
VGA connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 473mm x 296mm
1680x1050 60.0 +
1280x1024 75.0 60.0
1440x900 75.0 59.9
1280x960 60.0
1360x765 60.0
1152x864 75.0
1280x720 60.0
1024x768 75.0 70.1 60.0*
832x624 74.6
800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 75.0 72.8 66.7 59.9
720x400 70.1
LVDS connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 331mm x 207mm
1280x800 60.0 +
1024x768 60.0*
800x600 60.3
640x480 59.9
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

That with the laptop and monitor screen displaying.

LVDS connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 331mm x 207mm
1280x800 60.0 +
1024x768 60.0*

This means that your laptop display is running at 1024x768, but can go higher 1280x800 (native resolution) if desired. Your monitor is being driven at

1024x768 75.0 70.1 60.0*

You can change this with the xrandr command like

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1680x1050

You can type ‘man xrandr’ or ‘xrandr --help’ for more options. There are loads of useful HOWTOs online as well:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4003194&postcount=584

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2

KDE has a good GUI app called krandrtray that can be used to adjust display settings.

BTW, still don’t know what chipset or graphics driver you have…

graphics and chipset are :
Video Card Intel Integrated Video 950
Chipset Intel 943ML

The Thinkwiki (for IBM/Levono laptops) site has useful information about graphics chipsets, which is often applicable to other laptops.

Note what it has to say about the Intel Integrated Video 950, which is consistent with the advice deano_ferrari has been providing you: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 - ThinkWiki
and xrandr, and I quote:

External display with XRandR

Unfortunately, given all the radical changes to the Intel driver, and especially now with KMS, external display support has been rather in flux.

One of the issues encountered is that the maximum virtual screensize depending on driver version (or in the case of KMS, the kernel). This is important if you want to have an extended desktop (dual-display), but not for Mirror mode. If your using KMS, depending on what patches made it into the kernel the maximum virtual screensize is either 2048x2048 or 4096x4096. If your not using KMS, depending on the Intel driver version it will be either 1280x1280 or 2048x2048. 4096x4096 is not possible without KMS, and even then you might have to add this patch [Intel-gfx] [PATCH] drm/i915: Allow frame buffers up to 4096x4096 on 915/945 class hardware](http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/intel-gfx/2009-July/003353.html) to your kernel to enable it.

To see what your virtual screensize is, simply run xrandr from a cmdline and look for something like this

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1400 x 1050, maximum 4096 x 4096

As you can see in the above example the maximum virtual screensize is 4096x4096 which is ideal, and again, only possible in combination with KMS. If your getting 1280x1280 instead, your running an older Intel driver and have to add the Virtual line as shown below to your xorg.conf

Section "Screen"
     Identifier      "Default Screen"
     Device          "Intel Graphics Adapter"
     SubSection "Display"
            Virtual         2048 2048
     EndSubSection
EndSection

Once you have started X, you should find that your multiple monitors are automatically activated and mirror each other to the extent allowed by their potentially different geometries. If you want them to appear as a “large desktop”, you need to adjust their relative position with the XRandR utility. You can get an idea of what you’re working with by typing

xrandr -q

This will give you a list of outputs and tell you which ones are connected. The external display port should be called “VGA” or “DVI” (or “VGA1” or “DVI1” in case of KMS) while the builtin LCD should be called “LVDS”. (or “LVDS1” in case of KMS). If, for example you want to stack your desktops vertically, you might do something like

xrandr --output LVDS --below VGA

or

xrandr --output VGA --below LVDS

your window manager may treat the two cases differently in terms of where it decides to put things like the toolbar. Ideally, you probably want to put the desired xrandr command someplace that it might get executed before your window manager starts. For example in your ~/.xsession or ~/.xinitrc file.

if you keep reading on that site you will see there is more provided.