Xfce Forum

nicks27

Member

Registered: 2011-05-18

Posts: 4

Fn key to toggle laptop's display

The Fn+F7 key combination to toggle my laptop's display between internal/external/both doesn't work.
I'm running XFCE 4.8 on Xubuntu11.04. This used to work on previous installations (Xubuntu 9.04 to 10.10).
The machine is a Clevo M66JE laptop with NVidia C51 chipset and GeForce Go 6100 graphics controller.
I can get the external display to work via the NVidia X Server Settings, but it'd be preferable for the Fn+F7 keystroke to work.
All the other Fn+F? keystrokes work fine (mute, vol +/-, brightness +/-, etc).
Is there somewhere I can fix the configuration for this please? Thanks.

nsw42

Member

Registered: 2010-01-12

Posts: 36

Re: Fn key to toggle laptop's display

Hi there,

you might want to check if your graphic card is supported by "disper" (reading nvidia I guess it is).
With disper, you can change the display settings from the command line, like disper -s or -S to
switch to internal/external display.
Then you can assign disper commands to special keys; or like i did: write another script
that reads the disper -list output and sets the preferred display automatically.

nicks27

Member

Registered: 2011-05-18

Posts: 4

Re: Fn key to toggle laptop's display

Thanks. No sign of "disper" on my system, though I've come across some script suggestions using "xrandr". On my machine I've got as far as confirming that ACPI is detecting the keypress, and with the NVidia driver disabled Xfce4.8.0 / Xfwm4.8.1 pops up a "Display Settings" box that says "Several displays are available: Use: Laptop / Monitor / Both displays cloned". However with the NVidia driver installed that behaviour seems to be overridden and the keystroke is ignored. If I figure out how to configure the XWindow system with the NVidia driver so that it responds to the keypress without out needing customised scripts, I'll post more info. If anyone else knows what's going on and how to do this, please share.

nsw42

Member

Registered: 2010-01-12

Posts: 36

Re: Fn key to toggle laptop's display

Thanks. No sign of "disper" on my system, though I've come across some script suggestions using "xrandr". On my machine I've got as far as confirming that ACPI is detecting the keypress, and with the NVidia driver disabled Xfce4.8.0 / Xfwm4.8.1 pops up a "Display Settings" box that says "Several displays are available: Use: Laptop / Monitor / Both displays cloned". However with the NVidia driver installed that behaviour seems to be overridden and the keystroke is ignored. If I figure out how to configure the XWindow system with the NVidia driver so that it responds to the keypress without out needing customised scripts, I'll post more info. If anyone else knows what's going on and how to do this, please share.

What distribution are you running?

I know my ubuntu ... there is the System->additional drivers menu entry
(or gtk-jockey from command line)

I used that to enable the non-free NVIDIA drivers.
When nvdia is running, you can use its settings tool:

sudo /usr/bin/nvidia-settings

to detect displays and change them manually. When running as sudo,
you can also "save" your configuration.

Disper comes from here: http://willem.engen.nl/projects/disper/
(there is a PPA for ubuntu/debian somehwere, too)

jeromeg

Member

From: France

Registered: 2010-11-11

Posts: 131

Website

Re: Fn key to toggle laptop's display

nicks27: that bug should be fixed in xfce4-settings 4.8.1 (display settings showing nothing when using nvidia proprietary drivers). What version do you run?