Thinkpads Forum

I picked up an advanced mini dock today and was hoping to get two external monitors running off it. One of my monitors is an Acer AL1717 and supports up to 1280x1024 native res. It's analog only and doesn't support DVI. It works fine in the dock and I can run dual with the Acer + Thinkpad LCD for a total res of 2560x1024. My other external monitor is a Planar PL2010M and supports 1280x1024 and DVI. With the Planar plugged into the Dock's DVI port, I get the same result: Thinkpad LCD + Planar for a total res of 2560x1024. In each case, one of the monitors is unplugged. So both monitors work at 1280x1024 in either the VGA or DVI port. In all cases, the Thinkpad LCD is one of the displays that insists on coming up.

I've read here that when you plug both monitors into the dock, one VGA and the other DVI, the Thinkpad LCD should go black and both externals should turn on. This isn't the case for me though. The video card in my 14.1" Thinkpad is an ATI v5200. Would that matter ? When both externals are plugged into the dock, the VGA turns off and the DVI + Thinkpad LCD turn on. I've played with the display settings in the bios and didn't have much success.

The other thing to note is that I'm running Xubuntu Linux 7.10. I have my xorg.conf configured for dual display and the Thinkpad LCD + one external works great for a total spanned res of 2560x1024. Do I need to play with the xorg.conf so that the second monitor becomes active and the Thinkpad LCD turns off ? I'm lost, please help!

I would have suggested to use Presentation Director. But you are running Linux. So, maybe you get better responses in the Linux subforum.

I got it working using the aticonfig tool. This is what I had to do at the prompt as sudo:

aticonfig --initial -f
aticonfig --initial=dual-head --screen-layout=right
aticonfig --dtop=horizontal --overlay-on=1
aticonfig --resolution=0,2560x1024,1280x1024,1280x1024

and make sure that "aticonfig --query-monitor" reports this:

Connected monitors: crt1, lvds, tmds1
Enabled monitors: crt1, tmds1

"lvds" is the laptop lcd and should only be connected, not enabled.

It's working now but I'm afraid to reboot

Yup, it works

I initially had to diable the Thinkpad LCD, which can be done with this:

sudo aticonfig --enable-monitor=tdms1,crt1