gentoo dell laptop external monitor no workee
 

Hello! I'm about as complete a newbie to this as you can get; my very first linux box and it's been set up less than a week.
It's a Dell inspiron laptop and for the sake of my eyes I want to get an external monitor (hitachi) working on it, it I can. I'm running Gentoo with KDE.
Can you help?
Thanks!

It should work if you just plug in the monitor and press Fn + F8

If the monitor needs a different resolution or resfresh rate, you may have to reconfigure xfree86 by running "xf86config".

Hmmmmmm
 

It definitely had an effect, but not on my external monitor. I have that plugged into the monitor port on the back. When I hit the keys you recommended it cut my existing screen in two and swapped their locations, but had no impact on the external (and I did make sure it was connected and powered on). :)

I unplugged it and plugged it back in, and checked the var/log/messages; it's not adding a message when I do that. I wonder if that serial port is even on... but don't know how to check.

-bookwench