4

A while ago I repurposed an old Acer 8940 laptop to be a home theatre system using XBMC on top of Gentoo. I have video over HDMI to my 1080p TV which is working perfectly with X, and audio via the optical out to my 7.1 surround system.

My question is, is there any way I can force the Linux kernel to use HDMI exclusively for video, including for text that is normally output to the console? The video chipset is a nVidia GeForce 9600M GT.

I've spent weeks searching on Google for information and all I ever find is information either for X, which as I say is working perfectly, or how to get audio working over HDMI, which is irrelevant to me. I understand that for a desktop, if I only plug in the HDMI, then that would be the primary monitor and it would just work. However, with a laptop, the LCD panel is always connected and it is therefore understandably being designated the primary monitor.

I unfortunately have no option in the BIOS to disable the LCD panel so I'd be perfectly happy if I could only get it to mirror what appears on the panel.

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

You should extend your bootargs to force the kernel not to use LCD.

Do you use GRUB or LILO? I bet you use GRUB, so you should extend your GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT (/etc/default/grub) with the following:

video=LVDS-1:d

"d" means disable. The kernel should use the external video's native settings, but if you want to precise it you should add another video=... parameter.

Hope this helps.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .