Dell 620 w/docking station won't do X on the external monitor

[Doug Barton]

I have a shiny new Dell Latitude 620 with a docking station. In
windows I can do two heads, with the external monitor connected to the
docking station and the laptop screen as the second head. Works fine.

In FreeBSD, I can do X on the laptop screen standalone, or in the
dock. I can do terminal mode on the external screen if the laptop is
closed, or I can do terminal mode on the laptop screen if it's open.
(So far so good.) What I can't do is X on the external screen. I used
this same screen with my old desktop, so I know it works in X. Using
either the same data from my old xorg.conf, or the data from 'X
-configure' (almost identical) what happens is that the screen goes
black, then goes into power save mode. If I Ctrl-Alt-Backspace X dies,
but when the terminal comes back the screen has a whitish tinge to it,
and I can barely make out the prompts. Rebooting lets me see the
terminal again, but then I'm back to square one.

FWIW, I have a nice new nvidia card in this laptop, and I'm using the
nv driver in X because it's a core 2 duo, and I want to try to stick
with amd64. If the only way I can get this to work is to switch to
i386 and the nvidia drivers, I'll do that, but I'd rather not. (My
ultimate goal is to get X working dual-head with Xinerama, or maybe
TwinView the same way it works in windows, but I'll settle for X on
the external monitor for now.)


TIA,

Doug

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