Thursday, May 29, 2008

Dual Monitor on T60 (Internal + DVI)

I think I've found a way to make my T60p use the internal display and also drive an external monitor via the DVI port (on Linux). For some reason, this does not work automatically upon reboot, but has to be done from the command line.
aticonfig --dtop=horizontal --screen-layout=left --enable-monitor=lvds,tmds1
Now restart the X server and you should see video output on both monitors. I have the external monitor left of the laptop, so I need to run this command as well:
aticonfig --swap-monitor
Then, both monitors work. Unfortunately, I seem to have broken suspend/resume somewhere along the way. It seems that a combination of the things listed below make suspend/resume work again. I don't know if both are required or if either helps.
  • Update the fglrx driver. I'm using the kernel-module-ATI-upstream-fglrx (carries version numbers 8.452.1 and 2.6.18_53.1) as well as the ATI-upstream-fglrx package (version number 8.452.1-3.oc2) from the repository the IBM Open Client uses by default.
  • Disable the AIGLX extension

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