How to enable DVI port on docking station with ati card?

Tlaloc

I experimented a lot trying to get a picture on my secondary monitor attached to the DVI port of the docking station of my notebook with the xorg radeon driver, with some scary moments (don't play around too much with the MonitorLayout option!), but without success. I am quite sure that my problem isn't related to my xorg.conf, but to the fact that xorg always assumes that the monitor is attached to the vga port on the notebook itself.
Has anyone encountered this before and knows the solution?

Thanks, Val.

zerocool_australia · n00b Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 58

I had the same issue, I beat it into the ground and was unable to find a solution. It always assumed the VGA was connected. I have a HP/Compaq nc8230 with the advanced docking station. ATI X600 PCIE card.

In the end, i ended up using the ati-drivers (fglrx) instead of xorg's ati drivers. There is a few annoying things about the ati-drivers package, but at least i can use my DVI LCD without issue. It also helped to get tv-out working.

Tlaloc · Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 8:16 am Post subject:

I already thought to be out of luck with this problem.

While searching for solutions I found some references to radeontool, but they seemed to be out of date. Anyway, it is not that severe for me since latest fglrx works fine for me. I only wanted to try radeon drivers because I was looking for the possibility to clock down the graphic card a bit even in big desktop mode, which fglrx does not allow. That probably would allow my machine to stay just so cool for the fan to spin only at 20% when clocked at 800MHz, I really like the possibility to keep the notebook almost silent when only surfing.
One question though, since with my nx8220 also with ati 600 I almost have the same notebook as you. Does your docking station (basic model here) also emit a high pitched sound? Mine does, and the sound is related to the usb hub on the docking station and also present in Windows. Only unloading all usb modules/drivers can stop it.

Thanks, Val.

zerocool_australia · n00b Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 58

I didn't know you could clock down the graphics card speed...that's cool. These laptops do get extremely hot.
No sounds from the docking station...we have at least 20 of them at work (basic and advanced) and we haven't had that issue. If it's under warranty, send it back to HP

Tlaloc · Posted: Sun Jul 09, 2006 6:55 pm Post subject:

When the graphics card is clocked down there is quite a difference in temperature, if I remember correctly it was around 7°-8° Celcius for me. But like I said with a second monitor attached it is not possible (for now hopefully). One just has to issue the command "aticonfig --set-powerstate=[wanted state] after X has started, the optional entry in xorg.conf has no effect yet. And in the newest ati-drivers 8.26.18 there is also support now for automatic downclocking of the graphics card by the driver when it gets too hot. Ebuilds for that support are at bugs.gentoo.org for now, but probably it will hit the portage tree in the next week.

Bye, Val.

RoundsToZero · Guru Joined: 17 Nov 2003 Posts: 478 Location: New York, NY

You can follow progress and help with testing here: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3621.