John Lindal’s Blog

Re-enabling Eee PC External Monitor

I use my Eee PC as my dev box at home, so of course I have my Sony monitor plugged in. The wonderful feature of Metacity on Eeebuntu is that it automatically adjusts to the size and resolution of my monitor. There is a minor bug, however: the size of the root window is reported to be the size of the notebook screen, not the size of my monitor. In an attempt to fix this, I made the mistake of using the Video Displays menu in the Eee PC Tray. This disabled the external monitor, no matter which option I selected! After tracing through shell scripts, I discovered that /var/eeepc/vga_saved needs to contain 1. This re-enabled the external monitor.

Update (9/30/2009): The latest system update has fixed this. The Video Displays menu works. After the update, the external monitor went back to low resolution, but as soon as I selected External Display Only, it worked perfectly.