nvidia switch output

[Andreas Jellinghaus]

Lenovo T61 laptops with Nvidia Quadro 140 NVS Laptops and (k)ubuntu 8.04:
FN+F7 for switching video output (dvi <-> lcd) does not work. annoying for
people like me who use a docing station 50% of the time.

the old work around:
start nvidia-settings, click on displays, click detect displays, click the disabled
display, click configure, click on twinview, click ok, click on the old enabled
display, click configure, click on disable, click ok, click disable, click apply,
wait for the video output to switch, click appy, click quit, click quit.

well, that is too many clicks. I wrote a tiny C program to switch video output
using the nvidia control api. can you add this somewhere to ubuntu? maybe
to the nvidia driver? (or some extra package?)

bonus if you can configure fn+f7 to run this program :)

[Andreas Jellinghaus (tolonuga)]

the ACPI key for the video button is:
ibm/hotkey HKEY 00000080 00001007

so if you install this application as /root/bin/switch-display, you need to edit
/etc/acpi/events/ibm-videobtn and set action=/root/bin/switch-display

restart acpid using "/etc/init.d/acpid restart" (or reboot) and you should have a working
way to switch video output.

[Andreas Jellinghaus (tolonuga)]

this switches the video output, but doesn't change resolution, frequencies etc. so far.
need to figure out how nvidia-settings does that (and how "auto" resolution works there).
converted the tool to a patch and send it to the nvidia-settings developers and asked
for help there.

also DISPLAY and XAUTHORITY needs to be set so acpid can start some process accessing
X. e.g. "XAUTHORITY=`ls /var/run/xauth/*` DISPLAY=:0 /root/bin/switch-video" might work.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hi tolonuga,

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with the latest development release of Ubuntu? (ISOs are available from cdimage.ubuntu.com)

If it remains an issue, could you also attach a new /var/log/Xorg.0.log?
Thanks in advance.

The output of lspci -vvnn would also be worth having.

[Andreas Jellinghaus (tolonuga)]

sorry, I cannot test some daily image or whatever.

But I updated to 8.10 and now closing and re-opening the display switches the video output from external to internal and back. the resolution is not adjusted, but that is easy to work around.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thanks for letting us know it's no longer an issue. Closing.