*BSD News Article 29541


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From: jkh@sentnl.ilo.dec.com (Jordan Hubbard)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: Re: Notebook -- LCD/External display switching
Date: 11 Apr 1994 17:58:09 GMT
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Galway Ireland
Lines: 17
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <JKH.94Apr11185809@sentnl.ilo.dec.com>
References: <9410116.15230@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sentnl.ilo.dec.com
In-reply-to: summer@ee.mu.OZ.AU's message of Mon, 11 Apr 1994 06:40:53 GMT

In article <9410116.15230@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> summer@ee.mu.OZ.AU (Mark Summerfield) writes:

   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:

This would be called... syscons! :-)

Starting with XFree86 2.0 you can compile up FreeBSD with the syscons
driver (look in /sys/i386/conf/SYSCONS for an example) and XFree86 will
automagically detect it.  When outside of X, virtual screens are switched
using ALT-Fn<n> and inside using SHIFT-ALT-Fn<n>.  This has since been
changed to SHIFT-... both inside and outside of X, for consistency.

					Jordan