External monitor on an ATI Radeon Mob. 9000

[mangobrain]

Hey hey.
I'm having a few problems getting my laptop to use an external monitor. What I want - and what I can get with no problems under Windows (I feel dirty saying this, but can't you always?) - is to power JUST an external monitor, and to be able to take advantage of higher resolutions when doing so.

I'm using ati-drivers ver. 3.2.8. TV-out doesn't want to work, but that's another issue entirely. I ran fglxconfig and chose "laptop mode", which claims to allow switching between internal/external display, and clearly it doesn't do it automatically - I've got an external monitor connected as I type, with no signal; it does receive signal when I switch to a text console, just not from X. Er.. so how *do* you switch, then?

Bizarrely enough, I CAN get a cloned signal on CRT out when the "NoTV" option is set to "no", despite the fact that tv-out itself produces garbage, however this results in ever so slightly lower framerates (persisting even when the monitor/tv is disconnected). I'm not trying to use Xinerama - I just want to use my monitor when it's connected, with 1280x1024 resolution, and the internal flat panel when it's not, at 1024x768. Restarting X to switch between the two would be acceptable; however having a different config file for each scenario would be a major pain - if possible I want it to decide based on whether or not the external monitor is present, as previously stated, just like Windows currently does.

The most relevant options seem to be "DesktopSetup" and "MonitorLayout"; mine are currently set to "0x00000100" and "AUTO, NONE" respectively.