Arch Linux

ymarcov

Member

Registered: 2009-06-01

Posts: 2

Toggling Monitors

Hello,

my tricky situation goes like this:

I have two monitors, both LG (not that it matters), one 19" DVI and one 37" HDMI. Both connected to the same video card.

What I want to do is run the 19" on 1280x1024 and the 37" on 1920x1080. I want one monitor to be disabled while the other is working, and I want a script that toggles between the two monitors and resolutions.

How would I go about something like this?

GGLucas

Member

Registered: 2008-03-13

Posts: 113

Re: Toggling Monitors

You could try messing with xrandr, which might do what you want, resolution changing wise, but I've never heard of moving an X screen between monitors.

brisbin33

Member

From: boston, ma

Registered: 2008-07-24

Posts: 1,796

Website

Re: Toggling Monitors

i was going to say you could just setup two X screens.  the default on vc7 then another on vc6 or something.  each with their own xorg.conf's specifying res and monitor.

you'd have to read some man pages to find the commands to do this but i'm confident it's possible.

then C-A F6/7 would be your shortcut between them. 

you would be limited though; you'd have to close and reopen apps/files when changing between monitors.  depending on your use case that might be alright, if you've always got email open on the little one and GIMP on the big one or something then this setup could actually be perfect.

---

//github/

keegan

Member

Registered: 2009-05-12

Posts: 54

Re: Toggling Monitors

You could try messing with xrandr, which might do what you want, resolution changing wise, but I've never heard of moving an X screen between monitors.

Yea, you can do this with xrandr as long as you specify the action for both screens in the command line, like VGA1 --off VGA2 --auto

madalu

Member

Registered: 2009-05-05

Posts: 217

Re: Toggling Monitors

I realize you asked for a script, but you could also try out lxrandr, which is a really simple GUI for toggling monitors.

It's in community.

ymarcov

Member

Registered: 2009-06-01

Posts: 2

Re: Toggling Monitors

lxrandr is sweet, thanks. I was looking for a script to run manually, anyway, so this works.

eldragon

Member

From: Buenos Aires

Registered: 2008-11-18

Posts: 1,029

Re: Toggling Monitors

this is what i did to do just that: quite hacky if you ask me

#!/bin/bash
. /etc/screen_switch.conf

xrandr --output ${VIDEO_OUTPUT[0]} --off --output ${VIDEO_OUTPUT[1]} --auto
echo "VIDEO_OUTPUT=( ${VIDEO_OUTPUT[1]} ${VIDEO_OUTPUT[0]} )" > /etc/screen_switch.conf

and screenswitch.conf has

VIDEO_OUTPUT=( VGA LVDS )

ive mapped the script to SUPER_L + F5

gonna check out lxrandr

Last edited by eldragon (2009-06-02 20:08:09)