Random footnotes of Engineering

So I've been having a few problems with my laptop lately. It boots fine, but occasionally it will just hang in the middle of doing things. Also occasionally on boot I get random pixelated weirdness. This led me to start to suspect something was wrong with the onboard nVidia adapter. Fortunately I have a Sony SZ laptop that I can switch to use the Intel graphics device instead. So I powered off, flipped the switch and booted. This seems to have fixed that problem, but it turned out this was only the start.

I rock up to the office on Monday morning. I have an external monitor so I don't develop eyestrain, etc. Now I'm faced with the Herculean task of making Xorg recognise and do the appropriate things with an external monitor. To add to this difficulty I also have to do a bunch of presentations with the laptop so I need to have a configuration that will work nicely on the road too (with all sorts of random projectors, etc).

After fooling around with this stuff for a while I discovered that it's necessary to the 'Virtual' desktop size so that Xrandr can do it's magic. This wasn't actually a trivial task. Since virtual console support in Solaris is still working it's way to the surface the only way to test new Xorg.conf files (that I could figure out) was essentially to reboot if X didn't come back up it made the process fairly slow.

What I ended up with was the following config. It all seems to be working fine now. I've spent most of the last month with this config. The only issue is that by having such a large Virtual setting (Virtual 3200 1200) that compiz won't work for this setup. The next step is to find enough time to convince Sony that the nVidia chipset is irrecoverably broken...