Tuesday, December 18, 2007

ATI Linux Driver: instant display switching

Today I was fooling around with my xorg configuration for my ATI Driver (I have some irritating artefacts in the right lower corner of my screen - anyone?).

When playing with aticonfig, I noticed that it lets you switch instantly from single to dual-head mode, without touching the rest of xorg, and without so much as a glitch!
I wrote a little script that now automatically switches my laptop between the LCD and a mirrored dual-head for presentation mode.


#!/bin/bash

STATE=$(aticonfig --query-monitor | grep Enabled | awk -F: {'print $2'} | sed 's/\s//g' )

case "$STATE" in
lvds)
echo Switching to dual screen...
aticonfig --enable-monitor=lvds,crt1
;;
crt1,lvds)
echo Switching to single screen...
aticonfig --enable-monitor=lvds
;;
lvds,crt1)
echo Switching to single screen...
aticonfig --enable-monitor=lvds
;;
esac


I've created a link to it on my desktop, and now I click the icon and I have my presentation mode!
Beware: always select a resolution first that is supported by both screens, otherwise you get a corrupted display (nothing serious though).

Have fun!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is the script and desktop icon available as a one-click install?

Rocketman said...

I have the same artifact problem on my Dell Latitude D610. Were you able to find any resolution for them?