FreeBSD 11.1, Xfce, and laptop screen and external monitor resolution

[Polytropon]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2017 21:27:12 -0700, David Christensen wrote:
> On 08/01/17 21:54, David Christensen wrote:
> >  I've downloaded 
> > debian-9.1.0-amd64-xfce-CD-1.iso and will evaluate that next.
> 
> Wow!  X.org works better than I have ever seen -- the Xfce "Displays" 
> dialog gives me 4 choices:
> 
> 
> 1.  Laptop -- defaults to 1280x800.
> 
> 2.  Mirror Displays -- defaults to 1024x768 on both.
> 
> 3.  Extend to the right -- laptop is 1280x800 and monitor is 1920x1080.
> 
> 4.  ViewSonic 22" -- defaults to 1920x1080.

That is mostly what I could do with FreeBSD and "hardware
mechanisms":

1. - trivial, worked out of the box

2. - worked when Fn+PF7 (I think, look at the key captions) was
     pressed, so the laptop's display got vertical black bars
     to arrange 1024x768 (which the initial external monitor had)

3. - I have tried something similar with a Lenovo laptop and a
     docking station, so X could somehow manage "two displays",
     just if a PCI GPU had a VGA and a DVI connector

4. - again, "hardware", when the internal display was switched
     off, the (new) external display's size was properly detected

Nothing really required specific support in software, not as
a specific driver or the ability to change a setting inside a
desktop environment. I know that a lot of this can experimentally
be achieved with the xrandr tool, the rest can be "hard-coded"
if needed in xorg.conf's successor.



> When I bought the laptop with Windows XP 10 years ago, the choices were 
> #1, #2, and a version of #4 limited to 1024x768.  #3 wasn't even available.

I think #3 is a feature of X's multi-display support, such as
the ability to have two separate screens, or just "concatenate
them" (vertically or horizontally) into one logical screen; I
think this is called the "Xinerama" extension - it's years ago
that I experimented with this. :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...