I have an oldish Dell Latitude D610 laptop, and I just did a fresh install of
Kubuntu 10.04, which uses KDE 4.4.2. Everything seemed to go smoothly.

My problem is when I try to connect the VGA port on the back of the laptop to my new flat screen TV. I plug the TV into the port and nothing happens. I go into System Settings -> Display -> Size and Orientation, which shows me that a display is connected to the VGA port but that display is disabled. If I select the correct resolution (1920x1080, indicated as "auto" in the combo box) and hit apply, I lose both my screens. Both displays show garbage (it looks a litle like those posters that are 3d if you look at them square eyed).

If I set the resolution on both displays to 1024x768 (the laptop screen defaults to 1400x1050) I can display both screens, either cloning, or displaying side by side, but I haven't found any other combination of resolutions that seems to work.

This is beyond my usual level of expertise, so I'm not even sure what I should do to debug it. I can dualboot into Windows, and the displays work there with no problem.

lspci | grep VGA yields

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M22 [Mobility Radeon X300]

and most of the advice out there seems to be for nvidia cards.

Has anyone seen anything similar, or have some advice?

You need to allow the displays to have different resolutions I guess. System Settings refers to this as Unified Output I think, so disable that setting. You should be able to alter it from krandrtray.

bcooksley wrote:You need to allow the displays to have different resolutions I guess. System Settings refers to this as Unified Output I think, so disable that setting. You should be able to alter it from krandrtray.

The system settings dialog allows you to set the resolutions differently (it's quite a nicely designed form actually).

I got my external display working by installing gnome and grandr. Once the display was working with the correct resolution I was able to log into KDE and the display continued to work (although the laptop now displays a subset of the external monitor, instead of a separate window). I'll try krandr to see if can go one step better.