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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!cs.mu.OZ.AU!summer
From: summer@ee.mu.OZ.AU (Mark Summerfield)
Subject: Notebook -- LCD/External display switching
Message-ID: <9410116.15230@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Sender: news@cs.mu.OZ.AU
Organization: Dept of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne
Date: Mon, 11 Apr 1994 06:40:53 GMT
Lines: 31
Hi,
I am running FreeBSD 1.0.2 and XFree86 2.0 very happily on an extremely
generic notebook (with 486DX/33, 16M RAM). The display controller is
apparently a Cirrus device (that's all the info in the documentation,
I'd have to open the machine up to get any more detail if it were
necessary). The display can be switched by software between the
LCD panel, and an external VGA monitor -- DOS and Windows programs were
provided with the computer for doing this, and I have used a colour
monitor here at work under Windows when preparing colour graphics.
I would like to be able to do the same thing under FreeBSD. The first
thing which occurred to me (with my admittedly limited knowledge of kernel
hacking) was that it should be possible to add an ioctl function to the
console driver which would switch the display. Having done this, writing
a user program to do this would be trivial. I have three questions:
1) Is there anybody out there who has already done something like this?
Any advice, code, ideas would be appreciated.
2) Is what I have suggested an appropriate way of doing what I want to do?
3) Does anybody have, or know where I can get, the necessary information
about my hardware?
Thanks in advance for any thoughts,
Mark.
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Mark Summerfield, Photonics Research Laboratory
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Melbourne
ACSnet[AARN/Internet]: summer@ee.mu.oz[.au]
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