Arch Linux

davvil

Member

Registered: 2008-05-06

Posts: 165

Automatically detecting an external monitor

I recently got an external monitor (with a nice 2048x1152 resolution ) to use it together with my laptop in a dual-head configuration. I can configure it with xrandr and everything works fine. What I would like now is that X automatically detects if the monitor is connected and adapts the resolution accordingly. The keyword here is dynamically, I do not want to hardcode it into xorg.conf, as I also use the laptop on the road.

This looks quite good http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_Rand … t_on_login, but arch doesn't seem to have the /etc/X11/Xsession.d/ directory. The most similar directory I found is /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d, but it doesn't seem to work (I put an echo command redirected to a file in the script to see if it was at least trying to do something, but no). Any idea where the script should be put?

MadTux

Member

Registered: 2009-09-20

Posts: 553

Re: Automatically detecting an external monitor

Maybe this helps

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xor … tor_setups

davvil

Member

Registered: 2008-05-06

Posts: 165

Re: Automatically detecting an external monitor

This is more or less what I am doing, starting it manually. I could put it into .xinitrc, but I would prefer to have it working globally and automatically for all (well, the two ) users of the laptop. And the links in the RandR1.2 page all discuss either manually selecting the output of hardcoding it into xorg.conf.

Wittfella

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-05-27

Posts: 462

Re: Automatically detecting an external monitor

I don't use both screens at the same time, only one or the other depending if the external is plugged in or not but this might help you get started.  I put this in my .xinitrc:

xrandr | grep VGA | grep " connected "
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
    xrandr --output LVDS --off
    xrandr --output VGA --auto
fi