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Re: [LUG] eee pc & Ubuntu

 

On 01/02/14 16:43, Kevin Lucas wrote:
> Hi all I had to share this as it's so frustrating its unbelievable...
> 
> I have a eee pc which has run many flavours of linux but now after
> replacing CPU fan and adding 1 gig of RAM is pretty good as a portable
> system around the house.
> 
> So 2 weeks ago it updates and I put it away and come again to use it (to
> show someone how to set up their new router.. and it boots up with no
> display...? (it skips any bios message)
> 
> Well its 6 years old and even though Ive just updated it I am not
> surprised the display has failed.  So I think I can use it as a Netflix
> gadget on the telly in the back room as it has Wireless and a reasonable
> graphics chipset, so I plug it in and want to set the screen saver to
> not come on and if its sleeping to wake up on keyboard. Also the GDM set
> to the Telly display so we can login.
> 
>   In doing this I can only have Separate displays or Mirrored Displays
> but the combinations have one or the other screens rotated not both in
> landscape.. This is ok as the laptop display has died. To finalise the
> settings I look at the Display Brightness and Lock to set up no Dimming
> and no Turn off display after time, and guess what   
> I see the slider for the Display is all the way to the left!
> 
> So sliding it up I get the laptop display appear but rotated 
> 
> So use the laptop as normal and forget about Netflicks etc or carry on
> and fix it so both displays work in landscape.. what do you think of my
> chances?
> 
> It has an Intel 945 graphics controller .


Not completely sure what it is exactly that you're trying to do here,
but I can assure you of two things:

1: An Intel 945 chipset is decidedly NOT a "reasonable graphics chipset"
2: "man xrandr" is the answer to all your problems

You can use xrandr to define either the broken laptop display or the TV
as the primary display and then set the geometry, resolution and
rotation manually with a quick command. For your purposes you'd probably
be best off disabling GDM or any other greeters and instead launching
into a minimalistic DM from a custom .xinitrc file: as an added bonus,
you can include in the .xinitrc extra statements to disable the
screensaver/screen blanking. For example:

xset s off         # don't activate screensaver
xset -dpms         # disable DPMS (Energy Star) features.
xset s noblank     # don't blank the video device

You might actually benefit from checking out the last few days posts on
Phil's "Commandeering X" thread - this seems like an ideal scenario to
demote your EEE PC to a dumb box that simply throws media at your TV so
remotely controlling the X server could actually be a desirable feature
in your scenario, rather than a slightly deranged gimmick.

Regards


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