External monitor switching dosen't works properly on HP nx9105

[tuharsky]

Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty, laptop HP Compaq nx9105

External monitor only starts in the case it is already plugged in during startup. It runs then in "both" mode. However, when login screen is displayed, display is switched to external-only mode. There's no way out of this, known for me.

If external monitor is NOT plugged in during startup, and only plugged in after login, it is ignored. It only activates on shutdown.

The Fn-F4 key, that should switch the display mode, dosen't work. Other Fn keys work, however.
[lspci]
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: nVidia Corporation nForce3 Host Bridge [10de:00d1] (rev a4)
     Subsystem: nVidia Corporation Unknown device [10de:0c80]
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation NV17 [GeForce4 420 Go 32M] [10de:0176] (rev a3) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
     Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Unknown device [103c:006d]

[tuharsky (tuharsky)]

Laptop is HP nx9105 with nVidia NV17 [GeForce4 450 Go 32M] rev.a3

With Gutsy, it is like this:

With distributional X driver:
If the external monitor is plugged in during startup, it works, even Ubuntu startup logo is OK, until the graphical mode (GDM) is started. Then, blinking textual nonsense is displayed on the external monitor. Fn-F4 seems to switch to internal-only, then external-only. When both-monitors is enabled again, the image on internal LCD is garbled. Seems narrowed by 1/3 and overlayed on right side.
Interestingly, when the screen is blanked during inactivity, and then restored (e.q. by moving a mouse), the textual nonse on external monitor is greyscaled.
When rebooting, text mode is entered, so that external monitor can be read again, however if it faded to the greyscale before, the text is also grey, with limited visibility.

See pictures attached.

[tuharsky (tuharsky)]

With propietary nvidia driver, the Fn-F4 dosen't really do anything.

However, if the external monitor is plugged in during startup, the laptop starts in external-only mode, while is external is not plugged during startup, it starts with internal-only.

[tuharsky (tuharsky)]

Hardy alpha4, still dosen't work.

[Pablo Castellano (pablocastellano)]

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 latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[tuharsky (tuharsky)]

Yes, it is an issue. I don't know, whether anyone is willing to fix it. X.org guyt told, that this is nvidia driver issue that noone will fix. They didn't answer me the question, why.

[Pablo Castellano (pablocastellano)]

The nvidia driver is not open source, so the linux community can't fix its bugs.
You can install a different version of the driver running 'jockey-gtk'.
Try them, maybe with some of them it works.
Keep it updated, I'm marking your report as 'New' again.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

[This is an automated message]

Hi tuharsky,

Thanks for including an image to demonstrate the issue. Could you also please attach the output of `lspci -vvnn`, and attach your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file from after reproducing this issue. If you've made any customizations to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf please attach that as well.

[tuharsky (tuharsky)]

Trying again with Hardy, the textual chaos displays in graphical mode everytime I start, either with monitor plugged in or not. Fn-F4 does nothing at all, although the external display blanks for a few miliseconds.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thank you for reporting this issue about xserver-xorg-video-nv. Starting
with Lucid, Ubuntu is transitioning to using the -nouveau video driver
by default instead of -nv. The reason for this change is because
upstream development for the -nv driver has been quite slow. We are
quite pleased with the upstream development speed for -nouveau, and hope
this will translate into swifter bug fixes as well.

Because of this, I'm closing this bug report at this time. I'm marking
it wontfix because what you describe is probably a valid issue, but we
do not have further plans to work on it in Ubuntu. If you would still like
to see this issue investigated, I would encourage you to file it
upstream at http://bugs.freedesktop.org/.