Dell Latitude E6410 muiple monitors using docking station
I am using Dell Latitude E6410 with a docking station which provides external monitor, USB and audio I/O ports. I am using openSuse 12.1 with KDE. My graphics card as listed by lspci is:
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02) When not plugged in to the docking station my LCD monitor is recognized as: eDP1 . The docking station's model number is: PR 03X . The external monitor is connected via DVI cable. The external monitor connected works fine, but the laptop's own LCD display remains off. Even KDE doesn't detect it. I want to use laptop's monitor as another KDE virtual desktop. How can I do so? |
Can you do a FN+F8 to enable the laptop LCD and then configure through KrandrTray?
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Nopes, that doesn't work.
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My friend is using the Ubuntu 11.10 with the same laptop model and docking station and both monitors work perfectly fine for him. To me now it looks like openSuse uses inappropriate drivers for my graphics card. How can I use Ubuntu's driver for my laptop without breaking the package system.
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What driver is your laptop using?
If you're not sure, post the output of lsmod. |
Its i915. Here is the output of lsmod for further info:
Code:
Module Size Used by |
Well, I know that driver works. Testing on my E5500 that has the same chipset. Don't have a docking station, but do have an external monitor hooked up. However, it DOESN'T remember the settings after rebooting, so I have to apply it every time...or create a xorg.conf.
If it's not working, I'm thinking you might have a hardware issue. Code:
i915 312036 3 |
I will try on my machine with an Ubuntu live disk and tell you the result. Can you please tell that other than output of /etc/X11 and lsmod what else do I need to note down to compare the two cases.
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Since you mentioned KDE in your first post, all I did was boot, start up krandrtray, verify it saw 2 monitors in the list, then configure it through said krandrtray. I am unable to try with OpenSuse due to the fact that I don't have it (I don't like their random version numbering), but did test on both Kubuntu and Debian Wheezy w/ KDE. Also on Arch w/ KDE. Worked on all those.
So it COULD be an issue with OpenSuse also...although when I ran whatever their old version was I did use dual monitors, but it was with an Nvidia card, not Intel. |
Thats quite the problem. Krandrtay recognises just one monitor (external monitor) for me.
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So even the live disc still only shows a single output?
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I used Ubuntu 11.10 Live CD to boot and it worked fine. Then I got the trick and tried my openSuse with external monitor connected to the dock turned on and kept the laptop lid open so that its also on. This way both the monitors were detected and I could set the settings from KDE display to not to clone the display but to put them side by side. It looks there is problem with the drivers so that if laptop of the monitors is turned one during startup it will go undetected later.
The dual monitor setup was cool. Here is my experience: * The 4 virtual desktops on one monitor and 4 on other. * I could set up two wallpapers for two screens. * However the virtual desktops for both screens were mapped one to one. If I switch to desktop grid on one screen it would show desktop grid on another monitor. And if I switch to virtual desktop one on one screen it switches to virtual desktop 1 on another screen. And the virtual desktops were kinda extended across the screens. * Moving windows across virtual-desktop/screen worked great. While in desktop grid mode I could move window from virtual desktop 1 screen 1 to virtual desktop 3 screen 2 easily. * The plasma taskbar was also movable across screen, which looked so cool. * I think the semantics of virtual desktops and multiple screens is not so much worked upon and it can be made more intuitive. Then I switched off my machine and a little while later I used it it with just the laptop monitor. The effects were disastrous. KDE still behaved as if with two monitor. I saw two different wallpapers over one another with one one of them visible at the left edge. Taskbar was missing. Desktop icons were missing. I deleted the kwinrc file and even lost the capability to show windows on screen. Even krunner was showing up and disappearing. Alt-tab would show the applications open but I couldn't switch to them. I deleted all plasma config files and kwin config files and then it worked fine. The solution I think is that when in dual/multiple monitor mode KDE should use separate configuration and when in single monitor mode use another configuration. When more/lesser monitors are there try to create new configurations accordingly. The customizations like adding/removing plasma applets, wallpaper change can be mapped to other configurations while user is is in one of the configurations. |
Yeah switched to fedora.
I don't see both displays but I can use them out of the box with DP as a single display using the default tools.
? I suppose that makes sense. I wonder if the experimental Ubuntu would work too? I can deal with Fedora. |
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