Laptop Testing: Switching to external display produces screen garbage

[Jerome S. Gotangco]

This is regarding a Canonical-supplied Toshiba Tecra M2 for Laptop Testing.

The Tecra M2 uses Fn+F5 to switch to an external display and toggle between
states. The problem is when switching tty7 (GNOME).

Upon activating Fn+F5, external display produces screen garbage of tty7.
However, tty1 to tty6 is diplayed correctly. Switching back to the laptop LCD
cuts the tty7 display in half. The workaround to fix this is go to the other tty
and go back to tty7 and you'll get a full screen again. This was tested in an
external monitor and a Panasonic LCD Projector and produced the same results.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2857: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2857

[Per-bothner (per-bothner)]

Xorg version: xorg-x11-6.8.2-19.x86_64 (Fedora Core 4 test2)
Hardware: Compaq Presario R3000, GeForce4 440 Go 64M

I think I'm seeing the same problem. My external monitor is a 1600x1200
ViewSonic VP201b LCD screen. I get some pretty colors, but nothing useful.
This is even the case with a low resolution of 1280x1024,
which the internal and external monitors support.
Using the vesa driver, it works fine, though I only get
1280x1024 resolution.

[Mharris-mharris (mharris-mharris)]

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=155294

[Jerome S. Gotangco (jsgotangco)]

This is regarding a Canonical-supplied Toshiba Tecra M2 for Laptop Testing.

The Tecra M2 uses Fn+F5 to switch to an external display and toggle between
states. The problem is when switching tty7 (GNOME).

Upon activating Fn+F5, external display produces screen garbage of tty7.
However, tty1 to tty6 is diplayed correctly. Switching back to the laptop LCD
cuts the tty7 display in half. The workaround to fix this is go to the other tty
and go back to tty7 and you'll get a full screen again. This was tested in an
external monitor and a Panasonic LCD Projector and produced the same results.

[Jerome S. Gotangco (jsgotangco)]

I forgot to add, this was in Colony 3

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

http://svn.berlios.de/viewcvs/haiku/haiku/trunk/src/add-ons/accelerants/nvidia/
- Haiku appears to have a driver that can support some dual-head configurations.

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

What video hardware is this?

[Jerome S. Gotangco (jsgotangco)]

Nvidia GeForce FX Go 5200 64MB

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

Right. In that case, we're basically screwed. The binary nvidia driver may work
here, but I don't think we've got any documentation on how to control the switching.

[Matthew Garrett (mjg59)]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2857 is the upstream bug. Daniel,
some nvidia love for you. You know you'll thank me.

[Yann Rouillard (yann-pleiades)]

Same bug with Dell Latitude D800 which also use the nv driver.

The binary nvidia driver works better but also has a bug when switching back to
lcd only (it keeps the display size of the crt monitor)

[Daniel Stone (daniels)]

dude, I'm not porting Haiku code into nv. crack fiend.

[khiraly (khiraly123)]

It work with Knoppix 4.0 out of the box (I have tried at 1280x1024 resolution
with my external monitor)
Knoppix use Xfree86 4.2 and "nv" driver.

With ubuntu (5.04, 5.10-pre) and X.org does not seem to work. (same garbage output)

Best regards,
 Khiraly

[Alvaro Muñoz (alvaro-munoz)]

Sadly Enough, the same thing happens in my HP laptop (hp dv 1325la). It works by
pressing fn+f4. It shows only garbage, and it cleans up if i switch to another
terminal and go back to tty7.
The weird thing is that I'm running an Intel 900 graphical chipset (detected as
i810.. weird), not an nvidia one.

[Jerome S. Gotangco (jsgotangco)]

This still persists on Dapper Beta, but sadly, we can't do anything about this for now.

[Daniel Stone (daniels)]

Sorry about the phenomenal bug spam, guys. Adding xorg-team@ to the QA contact so bugs don't get lost in future.

[Aaron Plattner (aplattner)]

There's no way I can support hotkey switching in nv. Sorry.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Upstream has closed this as "won't fix", so doing the same here.

[Aaron Plattner (aplattner)]

*** Bug 14657 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[tuharsky (tuharsky)]

What is the matter? Missing docs? Or whatever?

[tuharsky (tuharsky)]

Is there anything I can do to help with that?

What would You suggest?

[Marf (marcuswiederhold)]

I can confirm this bug on a BenQ Joybook R55 G22 with a Nvidia Geforce 7400 Go and on an old Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A 7600 with a ATI Radeon IGP 320 graphic card. Exactly the same effects.

[Aaron Plattner (aplattner)]

Re-closing. For recent systems, you should be able to get the hotkey events from acpid and use RandR.