Description of problem: Fn-F8 switches from the laptop LCD to an external monitor on my computer (Dell Inspiron 1150). In fc2, this worked reasonably well - it would switch, but there would be strange lines at the top of the screen, but ctrl-alt-backspace fixed things nicely. In fc3, this fails completely. It tries to start up the monitor (i.e. the led on the monitor goes green), but then it fails after a bit. Switching does work, however, from a virtual terminal. And I can start the machine and immediately switch to the external monitor and it will boot fine in the external monitor, but then I cannot switch back to the LCD. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-6.8.1-12.FC3.1 How reproducible: All the time Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot laptop in LCD mode 2.Hit the buttons to switch to external monitor while in X 3. Actual results: Attempts to start X fail on external monitor. Expected results: Should figure it out and move to external monitor. Additional info: This bug appears to be related to Bug #140201.
FYI, similar symptoms are reported in Bug #139588.
For Dell inspiron 1150, I have found two ways to use an external monitor. One is to start the computer and switch to the external monitor when in grub. This will make the external monitor availabel, but the LCD will not be for the duration. The other is to use a program call i810switch to turn on and off the external monitor. This will leave LCD on. For other dell's, the program i855crt works for many. For sony and toshiba, ltpconf appears to work, though I have not tried it.
When using special keystrokes such as Fn-F? on different laptop hardware, the laptop's own BIOS is in control of things, and may interfere with X. X has no knowledge of what the BIOS is doing behind it's back, and so one might find that these special keystrokes never work at all, or they work in one X release and not in another. Troubleshooting these problems are generally laptop make/model specific, and BIOS revision specific. People experiencing such problems are best reporting them directly to X.Org at http://bugs.freedesktop.org to ensure a wider number of developers see the bug report, and hopefully one of them has the same hardware and can investigate the matter. Once you have filed your bug report in the X.Org bugzilla, if you paste the X.Org bug URL here, Red Hat will track the issue in the upstream tracker, and if a fix becomes available, we will review it for consideration in future Fedora Core updates.
Setting status to "NEEDINFO", awaiting upstream bug report URL.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2444
For my hardware, the switching problem has essentially been fixed by some driver modifications. Follow the above url to get the play by play.
Thanks for the update David. I've read through the full text of the freedesktop.org bug report now. Sounds like this will be fixed in CVS head, and make it into X.Org X11 6.9.0 or 7.0 or whichever is next. You may also want to consider recommending X.Org to backport the fix to 6.8.x also, and suggest it as a candidate for XORG-6_8-branch for future stable updates. Setting status to "UPSTREAM" for tracking in the X.Org bugzilla. Thanks again.
*** Bug 139588 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***