USB to VGA

[Kevin Gordon]

Folks:

With time running out on 10.1.3 RC, I've had to narrow my scope here in
order to get anything concrete.  I'm now using just the 358 build on the
2xXO 1.5's and the 2 XO 1.0's. What I can say is that the behaviour of both
the USB2VGA and USB2VGA2 Startechs appear to be equivalent in anything I do.


I cant seem to get Xrandr to turn the external off and return control to the
XO display when the XO is running.  The output of xrandr only shows that
there is the external monitor.  It seems the XO screen has gone <poof>.  I
can only connect to the External if it is present on boot.  Although the
LSUSB shows the Startech ID when I plug it in after startup, the Xrandr
doest seem to let me push output to an external screen, nor even show me
that it's there.  This may be by design, or maybe I don't have my equipment
in the right 'ready-state'.  I am *not* an xrandr guru.  I can switch back
pretty trivially,and do a lot of other dual-head display stuff on an old IBM
Thinkpad running Ubuntu, with either GUI or pretty intuitive xrandr
commands, so I'm not sure what I might be missing here.

I *can* change the resolution to many 1024x768 and below of the external
display using the display preference menu option from the drop-down on the
Gnome menu of the XO, but not much else. Invoking that same
gnome-system-monitor command from the Sugar terminal prompt does not seem to
give me even that capability.  Not surprisingly, any Fn-F7 functionality I'm
used to on Ubuntu to switch between modes doesn't seem to be included as an
XO feature either.  So, I will break out the old Dell F11 box, and do a much
more 'structured' testing tonight so as not to be chasing as much of a
moving target.

For my selfish personal purposes, what is already there is great.  I don't
mind powering up with the monitor attached before, and then after the
presentation removing the monitor and powering back up again.  Martin, yes,
I have verified that if I accidentally unplug the external monitor then plug
it back in, it does come back up; but, it appears to need a little
kick-start tap on the trackpad or a key to synch back up to the right
resolution or else it sits there with a whole bunch of vertical
red/white/green pixel bars.  I must have sat very still before when I tested
:-)

One other thing I need to check further is that the XO 1.0 seems to have a
sluggish keyboard echo response to the screen when plugged into the external
monitor. sometimes when I'm tapping a sentence it pauses for up to 2 seconds
before echoing back the text.  I need to check more closely that it is
purely ext monitor related, I think.

Lastly, we use cheese, and doing a successful yum install cheese on an
out-of-the-box XO1 with 358 took .75 hours.  On the other XO 1.0, it just
hung. On both the XO 1.5's this took less than 5 minutes on my network. All
four machines were plugged into an Ethernet switch using RJ45 USB adapters.
I have a bunch of workarounds from Mikus on how to do downloadonly to other
storage, then localinstalls to get software loaded onto an XO1; but, this is
a piddly little rpm with no dependencies that sits in an olpc repo so I was
surprised that out-of-the-box it couldn't do that.  I was frightened to even
attempt a Sugar Software Update.  Of course, this has nothing to do with the
external monitor - and I digress.

So please me any hints, requests, demands, orders or feel free to hurl
invective at my amateurish methods.  I'm game, and I know that your clock is
ticking .

Cheers,

KG



On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 8:28 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Kevin Gordon <kgordon420 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Both 1.5's with both Startechs, with both monitors:  If the monitor is
> > already turned on, and already plugged into the USB port on the XO 1.5
> > before cold boot, the external monitor becomes active and looks
> fantastice,
> > every time.  This works on both the Sugar and Gnome boots.  System doesnt
> > seem to care if anyting else has been plugged into the USB port between
> > boots, still comes up first time every time.
>
> Great. Besides looking fantastic, does it work well? ;-)
>
> > Both 1.0's with both Startechs with both monitors:  If the monitor is
> > already turned on, and already plugged into the USB port on the XO 1.0
> > before cold boot, the external monitor becomes active and looks
> fantastic,
> > most the time.  This is the case on both the Sugar and Gnome boots.  The
> > most the time comes from :  If I have plugged a different USB device into
> > the port between boots, the XO 1.0 stalls at the 'third dot around the
> > circle' during boot and flashes the external monitor.
>
> That is very strange. Can you elaborate on the "a different usb
> device"? Can you give us exact steps to repro?
>
> > I have had absolutely no success in plugging any adapter with any monitor
> > into any of the XO's after XO is up.  LSUSB recognizes the adapter, but
> > doesn't activate the external monitor.
>
> Correct. We cannot reconfigure while running. You can in some cases
> where the 2 video ports are on the same card and you have recent
> drivers. But not inserting a new video device as we do in this case.
>
> > I have had no success in unplugging the adapter while the external
> monitor
> > is active.  The internal XO display does not come back active, and
> > replugging the external adapter does not bring the external monitor back
> > active.  Oops, now need to Power off again.
>
> Please try this again -- the external monitor will take a few seconds
> but in my testing it does come back.
>
> > Another little note, when the external becomes active when booting the
> Sugar
> > desktop, the internal display goes blank, once the External goes active.
> > When booting on the Gnome side, the internal display continues to display
> a
> > sort of console output, but it remains static.
>
> Minor oddity I guess.
>
> thanks for the testing!
>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
>
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