ATI Radeon Mobility M6 TV-out

[drbubo]

Hi!

I'd like to get Gentoo use the TV-out facility of my Compaq Presario 1714EA laptop equipped with an ATI Radeon (Mobility M6) video card.

So would many of you, as I see in this forum.

The threads I found on this subject suggest that the solution is to play with the atitvout package. However, I beleive that it is much simpler, at least for laptop users with dedicated key for the switching.

I beleive this, since I happen to have SuSE on my laptop, where this switching works flawlessly, forth and back, both in console (1024x768 VESA framebuffer) and X (1024x768, accelerated) mode.

In Gentoo, as soon as the kernel starts (the graphical grub menu isn't good, either, just the character-based), it sucks. I tried the latest gentoo-sources and the 2.4.20 and 2.4.22 vanilla-sources. No success. The furthest I got is that I could switch to TV-out, but not back (just freezing).

So it must be the kernel, that matters. If I transfer and compile the SuSE (8.2) kernel sources (2.4.20), switching works on my gentoo box, too. I started to fiddle with the kernel configurations, and found, that if I disable acpi in the SuSE kernel, it sucks, too.

So, I guess, the standard kernels (vanilla and gentoo with its patches) are not able to handle this LCD-TV-out switching, but SuSE uses a patch (and I think, this is their acpi patch) which makes it possible.

My question: (I'm not a kernel guru, sorry.) How to find out what
patches a certain kernel uses and how to transfer it to another
kernel?

I hope we got closer to the solution.

Thanks

drbubo