Fedora 10 Dual Display settings tool detecting external monitor as laptop LCD

[gaaschk]

I have a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop and I'm trying to get an external monitor running in dual display mode. When I bring the system up, both monitors come up mirroring. When I pull up the display settings tool, it displays an indicator in the top left corner of each monitor. But what is strange is that it shows Laptop LCD in the top corner of both displays, the laptop monitor and the external monitor. Something ever MORE strange is that I have a Dell Latitude E6400 (almost exactly the same model) and the dual display works flawlessly. Any advice? This one has me completely stumped.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

[dragonbite]

Originally Posted by gaaschk

I have a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop and I'm trying to get an external monitor running in dual display mode. When I bring the system up, both monitors come up mirroring. When I pull up the display settings tool, it displays an indicator in the top left corner of each monitor. But what is strange is that it shows Laptop LCD in the top corner of both displays, the laptop monitor and the external monitor. Something ever MORE strange is that I have a Dell Latitude E6400 (almost exactly the same model) and the dual display works flawlessly. Any advice? This one has me completely stumped.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

What is the video card of both laptops. Though similar, they may be different and that can cause them to act differently (perhaps).

Maybe do lspci and post the results?

[gaaschk]

Thanks for the quick response!

turns out the video cards are quite different. Looks like the E6500 is a Intel video card, the E6400 seems to be an nVidia card.


here's the output from lspci on the E6500
...
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Cantiga Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Cantiga Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
...

here's the output from lspci on the E6400
...
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 06eb (rev a1)
...


This is actually the first time I have had a Dell latitude with and intel graphics card. I guess that explains the differing behaviour!