http://norman.walsh.name/2006/10/23/xrandr 9 103 2006-10-23T09:46:57-04:00 $Date: 2006-10-23 10:37:04 -0400 (Mon, 23 Oct 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2006 Norman Walsh Rotate and resize your display without restarting X. Tim O'Reilly Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts. One of the nicest things about open source development is that it continues along even when you're not paying any attention. If you work in open source, you spend time improving the bits that you care about, that you have the time and expertise to work on, but that's what everyone else is doing too. As a result, running Linux on a Laptop has slowly and steadily become less tedious and more stable (commodity parts and other factors play a role, no doubt). Where I used to build a custom kernel and spend half a day getting things working, I now simply insert the latest distribution CD and install it. I expect everything to work when I do this, and it does. (Every now and then I worry about the wasted memory of extra drivers and support for hardware and features I'll never need, but it's been a couple of years since those concerns were strong enough to move me to action. The only thing that causes my machine to break into a sweat with any regularity is filtering spam!) My latest discovery is that xrandr now works, mostly out of the box. I had to tell X11 what resolutions to consider: Section "Device" Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. M10 NT [FireGL Mobility T2]" Driver "ati" BusID "PCI:1:0:0" # ndw Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS,CRT" Option "MergedFB" "true" Option "CRT2HSync" "32-91" Option "CRT2VRefresh" "56-76" Option "CRT2Position" "Above" Option "MetaModes" "1600x1200 1600x1200-1600x1200 1600x1200-1024x768" # /ndw EndSection But other than that it just works. I can switch easily between 1600x1200 (using my laptop away from my desk), 1600x1200-1600-x1200 (using my laptop in dual screen mode), and 1600x1200-1024x768 (using my laptop with a lower-resolution project as the second display). So much for all the caveats I had last time.