What a wonderful day it is, sir
It’s been a while since I wrote something, but I liked to share this with you all. I bought a new Dell Studio 1558 and all the fn-keys were working except the one to switch the displays…
I enjoy switching between dual-screen, using only my external 22″ or using only my laptop, when I’m on the road. So I was looking for a workaround.
This laptop, is my first machine with Ubuntu that uses an ATI graphics chip, so this was all quite new to me. But I have to say; I’m very very pleased with it.
Ok, so what do you have to do to get things working?
1. Create the script
Create the script, I called it toggleDisplay.sh and this is how it looks in my case:
#!/bin/bash # Script to toggle display configuration on Dell Studio 1558 # author: Ruben Verhack config="/tmp/display.conf" current=`cat $config` # Check if config exists if [ ! -a $config ] then # Empty file executes default touch $config; fi # Check if CRT2 is connected if xrandr -q | grep "CRT2 connected" then # Toggle between states case "$current" in '') # default xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output CRT2 --left-of LVDS --output CRT2 --auto echo "dual" > $config ;; 'dual') # was dual, now external only xrandr --output LVDS --off --output CRT2 --auto echo "external" > $config ;; 'external') # was external, now laptop only xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output CRT2 --off echo "laptop" > $config ;; 'laptop') # was laptop, now both xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output CRT2 --left-of LVDS --output CRT2 --auto echo "dual" > $config ;; esac else xrandr --output LVDS --auto fi
This toggles your displays from dual screen to external only to laptop only, and from there to dual screen again. Note that my monitors were called LVDS and CRT2, you can easily check how your monitors are called by executing:
xrandr -q