[ltp] F7 Video Switching on a T42?

[Alex Deucher]

On 3/14/06, Guarded Identity <q507ddf02@sneakemail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm pretty dedicated to Debian, but to play around with an application th=
at
> was brutally Debian-unfriendly (Intel's VTune), I installed some version =
of
> SUSE on a USB drive I had.  SUSE pre-configured my T42 pretty nicely.  On=
e
> thing that was caught me off guard was that the F7 video toggling actuall=
y
> seemed to work.  I had pretty much given up on this with Debian.  Actuall=
y,
> multi-head in X.org isn't exactly smooth-sailing even without the hotkey
> toggling, but SUSE seems to have it all rolled out rather nicely.
>
> Has anyone figured out how SUSE does it (specifically F7 toggling)?  Is i=
t a
> kernel hack (maybe to the ibm_acpi module)?  Most solutions that exist fo=
r
> other distributions are able to be ported into Debian, but I'm not sure a=
bout
> this one.

The fn-F7 video toggling is handled by the bios unless you explicitly
tell ibm_acpi to handle the fn events directly.  In that case they
just show up as acpi events that can be hooked to an application or
script.  Xorg doesn't currently support dynamic output switching so I
assume either the bios is handling the fn events directly or perhaps
acpi-video has some sort of interface that uses the bios to toggle the
outputs what is hooked into the fn events produced by ibm_acpi.

Alex

>
> - Sukant