Wednesday 6 January 2010

ATI Drivers get Xrandr 1.2

I've just upgraded my laptop to OpenSUSE 11.2 and whislt I was at it, I pulled in the latest ati fglrx driver and wireless drivers. For some reason the display driver put up a bit of a fight, I think the problem was left over of older versions of the driver.

Once I'd removed the old ones, the new driver installed and work without a problem. The laptop panel came up with my desktop. I took my laptop to the study and plugged into into the two external monitors (LCD and a CRT). Now things started to not work again. It would only use the built in panel. So i tried to use the "aticonfig" tool to fix the issues and I got a error message about aticonfig not working when randr 1.2 was active!!

This is great news, it means we now have proper randr in the ATI comerical drivers (if I've not made a mistake and load the free drivers :-) ). So I can now configure the mointor setup using standard randr tools. Also Xrandr is much easier to work with than aticonfig. I suspect it should be possible to write a script and attach it to the monitor key on the laptop.

I'll post again when I've had time to play with this a little more

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