ATI (fglrx) Dual monitor / laptop hot-plugging
- by Brendan Piater
I feel like I've gone back 5 years on my desktop today. I'll try not dump to much frustration here...
I been running 12.04 since alpha with the ATI open source drivers and the gnome 3 desktop. I been generally very happy with them with only small issues along the way.
Now of course it does not support 3D acceleration 100%, so games like my newly purchased Amnesia from the Humble bundle would not play. OK, no worries, the ATI driver is in the repos so let me have a go I thought. With all this testing that's been done with multi-monitor support, what could go wrong...?
How I use my computer:
It's laptop, with a HD 3670 card in it.
I spend about 50% of the time working directly on the laptop (at home) and about 50% of the time working with an additional display connected (at work), multi desktop environment.
What happening now:
installed drivers
things seemed to working, save some small other bugs (not critical)
this morning I take my machine and plug the additional monitor into it, and nothing happens... ok fine.
open "displays" try configure dual display, won't work
open ati config "thing" (cause it is a thing, a crap thing) and set-up monitors there
reboot it says (oh ffs, really.... ok)
reboot, login and wow, I got a gnome 2 desktop (presume gnome 3 fall back) and no multi-monitor...great. (screenshot: http://ubuntuone.com/5tFe3QNFsTSIGvUSVLsyL7 )
after getting into a situation where I had to Ctrl + Alt + Del to get out of a frozen display, I eventually manage to set-up a single display desktop on the "main" monitor
ok.. time to go home... unplug monitor... nothing happens.. oh boy here we go...
try displays again, nothing, just hangs the display.. great. crash all the apps and reboot...
So it's been a trying day...
What I really hope is that someone else has figured out how to avoid this PAIN.
Please help with a solution that:
allows me run fglrx (so I can run the games I want)
allows me to hot-plug a monitor to my laptop and remove it again
allows me to change the display so include the hot-plugged monitor (preferable automatically like it did with the open drivers)
Next best if that's not possible:
switch between laptop only display and monitor only display easily (i.e. not having to reboot/logout/suspened etc)
Really appreciate the time of anyone that has a solution.
Thanks in advance.
Regards
Brendan
PS: I guess I should file a bug about this too, so some direction as to the best place to file this would be appreciated too.
