Ubuntu

How to configure T61 External FlatScreen

Asked by cmnorton

I have a Thinkpad T61p. I have just installed Ubuntu 7.10 on it. Now, I want to make external video work.

My external monitor is an Acer AL194 LCD. It works fine with Windows XP, Fedora, and Ubuntu 7.10 (running on an Acer Travelmate).

My T61p's BIOS is configured to display to both outputs, LCD and external. The boot process is fine, but as soon as the Ubuntu logo displays, the Acer complains the input is invalid. Eventually, the Acer monitor shuts itself off, and my video is returned to the LCD display.

My LCD display is set to 1280 x 1024, but the same problem happened at lower display resolutions.

IBM Thinkpad Hardware Support said I needed to define a second monitor, but the display configuration would not let me hit OK -- OK did nothing and gave no error -- so I could not define the second monitor.

I would love some ideas on how to fix this.

Is this a bug, not being able to use the Screens And Graphics tool to configure the second monitor?

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Robert Di Gioia (digioiar) said : 		#1

Hi

To see if the system is recognizing your second monitor, run the following command in a terminal window (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). The system will ask for your password, type it in and press enter even though you won't see anything while typing the password, it is ok.

sudo lshw -C display

If one of the displays is labeled unclaimed, then the system is not recognizing it for some reason. To troubleshoot it, you could use the following command to scroll through the system startup messages to see if the system reported an error. The spacebar will scroll to the next page, the letter b will back up a page, q to quit.

dmesg | less

However, if you see both displays listed, then my guess is that you just need to reconfigure X. To do this, type the following command in a terminal window. Unless you're using a special driver, you should be able to accepts the defaults for all of the options.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Then reboot the system.

Good luck

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cmnorton (octopusgrabbus) said : 		#2

cnorton@mrshighpants:~$ sudo lshw -C display
  *-display
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: Quadro FX 570M
       vendor: nVidia Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
       version: a1
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga bus_master cap_list
       configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0 module=nvidia
cnorton@mrshighpants:~$

I do not see a second monitor. Can you give me a hint as to what kind of error would be in dmesg?

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cmnorton (octopusgrabbus) said : 		#3

I fixed this by de-selecting the nvidia driver and going with non-3D graphics. The vesa driver is working.

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Ashish (hellomisraji) said : 		#4

We do not need to de-select nvidia driver.

I ran the utility /usr/bin/nvidia-settings as the root.

We can configure the second monitor in that. It works perfectly well.

Regards,
Ashish