sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Heikki Wilenius <heikki.wilenius@xxxxxx>]

Hi,

I have good news regarding Bumblebee and HDMI. My external monitor now
works with native resolution!

I'm using Z13 (Nvidia 330m GPU) and Ubuntu 12.04.

I was lead to the right track after reading this:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/3024/good-nvidia-drivers-for-a-geforce-gt-330m-on-a-vaio-laptop

Like described in the link above, I disabled nouveau in Grub, just in
case it makes a difference:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nouveau.modeset=0"

The tricky bit is to get the EDID info to the X server. I did a search
for "edid" under /sys/, while the monitor was connected to the HDMI
output, and found the EDID path. I then put that info to the
xorg.conf.nvidia file.

Also I installed xserver-xorg-input-void to disable mouse and keyboard
from doubling on the external monitor.

Here's the xorg.conf.nvidia:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier "Layout0"
    InputDevice  "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice  "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    Option "AutoAddDevices" "false"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Device1"
    Driver "nvidia"
    VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
    Option "NoLogo" "true"
    Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0"
    Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:
/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/drm/card0/card0-HDMI-A-1/edid"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier      "Keyboard0"
    Driver          "void"
    Option          "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier      "Mouse0"
    Driver          "void"
    Option          "CorePointer"
EndSection

* * *

The bumblebee config file was edited like described in
https://github.com/Bumblebee-Project/Bumblebee/wiki/Multi-monitor-setup.

Last step was to install synergy so that the external monitor can be
controlled with the laptop mouse and keyboard, see instructions here:

http://itviking.net/blog/m11xr3-bumblebee-and-the-dual-screen-setup

* * *

So now I can start a terminal, and type

optirun true
export DISPLAY=:8 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/nvidia-current:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

and then start any program from that terminal window. I use awesome to
get a lightweight window manager on the external monitor.

Using itviking's synergy config file, I'll just drag my mouse over the
right edge of the screen to switch focus to the external monitor.

Haven't yet figured out whether this messes up with Bumblebee's power
management features. At least the parallel X server doesn't get
started before it is used.

Anyway, I really needed to use the HDMI output, so I'm happy now. =)

Sorry for the rambling write-up, but I hope this'll be of use to some of you!

Heikki