Switch between laptop display and external monitors on a docking station

[edwardcode]

I have just installed fedora core 15 on my Dell Lattitued E-6520 and it has a Nvidia NVS 4200m graphics card. I have finally gotten my xorg file set to display on two external monitors when docked but the only problem is when I un-dock the laptop to take the it home it does not switch the display to the laptop screen. Does any one know to to make this happen? I am totaly lost. Any help would be great.

[fjonewport]

Are you using the nvidia drivers? Does it work when you reboot?

The easiest way I have done this is to make the laptop screen active before undocking. Not elegant but a working solution.

[shedyed]

You might have set your xorg to have the external monitor as the primary display. Have an alternate xorg that has the laptop screen as primary, that's an option. Another would be to have Metamodes, if your xorg has that line, set the external monitor to null as one of the choices for display layouts. But I think xrandr can do that as well via command line, so let's have an xrandr guru step in to tell us how, or you may want to google that yourself.

[dlm4ut]

I have the same setup with 6520 and dual display at work. I undock and then hit ctrl alt backspace; this usually resets the display to the laptop. You can login in again. The problem for me then is that it thinks it is 3200 x 1200 instead of 1920x1200.

If you run system settings and display, you should be able to reset to 1920x1200. This setting is kept in the file .config/monitors.xml. You might have to mode this file to fix things.

dlm4ut

[aappddeev]

I have similar issues:

a) HP laptop 6910p, ATI graphics

b) 90W docking station (the one that connects underneath the computer)

c) FC16

When I boot up up, the docking station display comes up, but the driver thinks that the system has two monitors and it creates an extended display. The gnome (or KDE) login shows up on the laptop screen (but I have closed the laptop lid of course since its in the docking station). I have to do a blind Enter then a blind enter my password. No login panel appears on the docking station screen. The docking station display is significantly larger.

For some reason, fc16 thinks that it should be an extended screen versus one screen or the other.

Once I login, I get one screen.

I have played with the fc16 gnome3 "display" control panel but it is hard to figure out how to use it because it keeps jumping around on me as to which screen is active or not.