Per-output DPMS?

[Alex Deucher]

On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:55 AM, Richard Hughes <hughsient at gmail.com> wrote:
> I get quite a few bug reports from people using gnome-power-manager
> who want to turn off the internal laptop panel when docked, and turn
> the external panel on. On idle, the external panel should then blank,
> and then just the external panel should return to life when the mouse
> is moved.
>
> Ideally I could set a per-output DPMS setting, although I guess the
> same affect could be done with XRandr and turning the output off,
> although this takes a few seconds to come back on, and upsets the
> screen geometry. What's a sane thing to do in this case? Do I really
> want to switch off the output?

It sounds like you want to have the panel off in that case.  I think
you do want the geometry changed, otherwise you have a dead area where
some of your content is that is more or less impossible to access
until you manually unblank that output.  Assuming you want something
automatic to happen with docking, I think you could add a check box to
the gnome display tool or gpm; something like "disable internal panel
when docked" which would query the connected outputs and disable the
internal panel when an external monitor is connected when a dock event
was received from the kernel.

Per-output dpms would be useful for things like media players where
you might want to playback a movie on one head an have the other ones
blank when playback starts, but come back to life at the end or when
the mouse was moved.

Alex