[Cialug] Changing X settings from the command line

[David Champion]

Bailey, Jonathan C wrote:
> I'm finally finishing up the process of getting Ubuntu running on my
> laptop and am looking for some information... I've got suspend and
> hibernate to work fine, but need the laptop to detect if it's docked or
> not. I can handle the detection, but I want to know how I can change the
> monitor port/resolution on the command line to use the external LCD.
> Ubuntu auto-detects this automagicly during boot, but I don't know of a
> way after resume. Is there a way without killing my X session?
> 

AFAIK the X Server has to restart to change resolution. You can have 
multiple virtual resolutions, but that means screen-scrolling, which you 
probably don't want.

A fairly simple method would be for it to have 2 versions of your X 
config files (1 for docked, 1 for standalone), when it detects a change 
in the docking status, have it copy the new config... then restart X.

I use the 2 config file thing on my laptop, so I can switch down to the 
1024x768 that the LCD projector uses - but I just copy the file manually.

-dc