I stick my laptop (T61 Thinkpad) in the doc and boot up in the morning. My two external monitors are detected and everything loads up nice.

Now when I go to take my laptop out of the dock to head to a meeting it all goes to ****. I've tried hitting the button, not hitting the button (on the dock), using KDE's GUI thing to configure displays, I've tried using xrandr from the CLI but nothing wants to turn on the LVDS display.

I'm thinking its something to do with the fact that there are two crtc available. The two external monitors snag one each (though they should be able to share if they are the same resolution etc). So when I try to do

Code: Select all

xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto

it gives a crtc not found error.

I've never had any problems using Gnome. But everything else gives me fits. With Gnome I just pop open the lid (have a blank screen staring at me) do:

Code: Select all

# cat undock.sh
#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output VGA1 --off
xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto
xrandr --output DV1 --off


This shuts off two external monitors and turns on the laptop screen. Then when I come back to put it in the dock I do something similar, turning on VGA and DVI and turning off LVDS.

I've got a T61 and a similar setup - with me it only goes to pieces if I don't do FN+F9 before undocking. As soon as I press that key combination the machine is prepared to be undocked. The reverse is true for docking.

Does that help at all?

Do you use the button on the dock as well? I tried Doing FN+F9 but nothing really happened. I then hit the button on the dock and took the laptop out but X never comes back. I can switch to a virtual
terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F2).

Do I need to setup anything for KDE to pay attention to FN+F9 and do something specific?

Hm, I don't know your distro but you should definitely search for thinkpad in the repos. For Arch it was tp_smapi which did the business for me. It also lets me control battery charge levels and does a number of other fantastic things to the thinkpad.

Is there a way to tell KDE to stop trying to figure stuff out on its own and just let xrandr do its thing? Its like I tell Xrandr one thing and KDE does something different.

Mantis wrote:Is there a way to tell KDE to stop trying to figure stuff out on its own and just let xrandr do its thing? Its like I tell Xrandr one thing and KDE does something different.

I set the screen configuration via xrand as well, as with KDE-Tools the result is usually borked. However even if I use xrandr, it can go all wrong if KRandRTray is running. Luckily there seems to be some activity around this piece of software, so maybe that is/will be fixed soon.

So I am able to put the laptop in the dock and get things to work out OK. What I have to do is:

1. Turn on the VGA monitor
xrandr --output VGA1 --crtc 0 -mode 1680x1050 --pos 0x0

2. Turn off laptop screen
xrandr --output LVDS1 --off

3. Turn on DVI monitor
xrandr --output DVI1 --crtc 1 --mode 1680x1050 --pos 1680x0

Now to take it out of the dock I sort of do the reverse

1. Turn off DVI
xrandr --output DVI1 --off

2. Turn on laptop screen
xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1440x900 --pops 0x0 --crtc 1 (note the CRTC flag is the key)

3. Turn off VGA
xrandr --output VGA1 --off

So now the laptop display is on and everything is happy. But when I pop it out of the dock or even hit the button (on the dock) the display shuts off. It's almost like X crashes. I can do ctrl+alt+backspace to get X back, but of course my session has been killed. So its better than rebooting, but not by much.