[GTALUG] Headless laptop - controlling X settings

[Giles Orr]

On 25 January 2016 at 21:04, William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> 1. Check BIOS to set monitor priority.
> 2. Try booting into console mode by
>     - runlevel 1 at kernel boot option
>     - alt-ctrl-fn to get VTn
>
> I assume you already did 1 and 2.
>
> 3. SSH into it and 'telinit 1'.  Don't know if it still works with
> systemd.
> 4. Try Ubuntu. :-)

BIOS -> Main -> Power on display ->

changed to "Simultaneous" from "Auto-selected."  This has fixed the
main problem.  Thanks!

Now I'm up against another problem, almost certainly the reason I
landed here in the first place: the folks at Debian removed the
xserver-xorg-video-sis between wheezy and jessie, and that's
(probably) what broke the machine as it has a SiS video card.  It
sorta works with the vesa driver (1024x768 max and weird fonts), but I
guess I'll live with that (or figure out how to fix it).

Thanks for all the suggestions.

> See if you can get it to boot to console mode:
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 08:38:00PM -0500, Giles Orr wrote:
>> I have an old laptop (an Acer Travelmate 270 to be exact) that has no
>> screen.  The screen busted years ago, and I simply removed it.  This
>> wasn't a big problem until a couple days ago: I'd hook it up to an
>> external screen via the VGA out, and everything was fine.  But a
>> couple days ago, I upgraded from Debian wheezy to Debian jessie, and
>> after the upgrade the external monitor now claims the provided signal
>> is "Out of Range."  This doesn't appear to be the same as "No signal"
>> because after several minutes it switches off (about when the screen
>> blanking would kick in) and pressing a keyboard button brings back the
>> "Out of Range" signal.  I can ssh into the machine, so there's an
>> option to fix it.  I could potentially install Ubuntu or re-install
>> wheezy, but I'd prefer to fix this if possible.  How do I tell X to
>> detect and use the monitor over the external VGA connector - and only
>> that connector, ignoring the now-missing internal screen candidate?
>> And failing that, how can I force 1024x768 (which is what was working
>> fine with wheezy) with mirroring across both outputs?
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> P.S. I was clever enough to try ssh with X-forwarding and then running
>> arandr and eventually xrandr, but they work with the X server they can
>> talk to ... which is your local machine, not the remote you've sshed
>> into.  Even had that worked, I wouldn't know what settings to put into
>> what file: it was bad enough back in the days of editing
>> /etc/X11/Xorg.conf by hand, but it's now been replaced by a twisty
>> maze of start-up scripts that are supposed to detect everything for
>> you that mostly work but which have remained stubbornly opaque to me
>> when they fail ...


-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr at gmail.com