Dynamically switch ServerLayout - is it possible ?

[Alan Hourihane]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 21:22 -0700, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Tuesday 25 October 2005 09:47, Alan Hourihane wrote:
> > On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 18:31 +0200, Joe Ammann wrote:
> > > Hm, I'm not so sure. In my case, the internal laptop LCD would have to be
> > > turned off also, because it can not display the full size mode of the
> > > external display. So even if the new monitor would be detected correctly
> > > on the fly, the driver would have to reconfigure its pipes.
> > >
> > > I'm not sure if RandR is enough to manage it (assuming the display could
> > > be detected)
> >
> > There still needs to be policy decisions, but the resolution change is
> > all manageable by RandR. That's my point.
> >
> > For example,
> >
> > In a single LCD situation running at 1024x768. You then plug the laptop
> > into an external CRT which can do 1600x1200. The driver shouldn't change
> > anything at this point, apart from maybe cloning the display to the CRT
> > (but this is policy again). Now, new modes would be exported by RandR
> > that could manage 1600x1200. So, if you requested a resolution change
> > via RandR and it was 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 the driver would
> > automatically turn off the LCD or revert to panning the display.
> 
> I think the policy decision should be made by the user in this case through 
> some sort of GUI. Such a GUI should be able to express to the user that he 
> can get either 1280x1024 on LCD + external CRT, or 1600x1200 on external CRT 
> only. For a GUI to do so RandR should include the active output ports along 
> with the resolution.

The policy - most definately - should be user configurable.

But RandR doesn't need to know about active ports. It's just exporting
valid screen sizes. It's the driver that knows what's going on. So any
GUI config tool needs to come from the drivers viewpoint.

And I know that Thomas with the SiS driver already has such a tool to
configure certain options on the fly. We should extend that to other
drivers.

Alan.