XRandr and Intel i915


I've finally figured out how to get my external monitor working with my acer aspire 1691WLMi laptop in side-by-side mode. The trick is to use the Virtual option with a large enough x dimension. Most of the documentation I've found up till now has stated that making Virtual larger than 2048 x 2048 was not possible. Well, turns out it is possible, but you disabled 3D acceleration. For me, that's not a problem. I don't use 3D for anything. mythtv works great on the laptops LCD while my desktop moves to the external monitor. BTW, moving the gnome panel to the external monitor happens because the intel chip always makes the VGA (re: external monitor) screen 0. In my case this means I lose 32 pixels in height since the external monitor is 1280×768 while the Acer Aspire is 1280×800. Minor annoyance.

So the xorg.conf now looks like this example.  Pay attention to the Screen section.

Detailed information on this can be found on ThinkWiki.