Using a second screen with an iBook G4

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

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Hi there.

Since I have one iBook G4 here, I think that one use for it would be to put it
to work as a home-theater PC. Unfortunately, it seems that we have some problems:

* When I plug an external (1920x1080) monitor on it, I can only get 1024x768 on
the external monitor, which is, of course, quite bad. More than that, I can only
use the external monitor if I disable the internal monitor, because, otherwise,
I get a message (paraphrased) that tells me that the largest screen that can be
allocated is 1024x1024.

I can provide the full details if desired. I am using gnome 2's monitor/randr
applet to choose which output to use.

This is weird, because I remember using a hack in OpenFirmware that unlocked the
iBook's ability to use two screens as its monitor in the past. It worked fine
with MacOS X 10.5, but I don't have MacOS X installed anymore. [0]

[0]: http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html

Is it possible to get rid of any of those limitations? Any one of the use of the
external monitor in some higher resolution or the use of the external monitor as
an extension of the internal one would be nice additions.

* It seems that the "ready made" media center programs (XBMC) use a lot of
OpenGL stuff and that is sufficient to bring this notebook to its knees, even
when browsing the menus. Almost unusable. I tried moovida, and it is definitely
faster, but it has some bugs and upstream seems to be dead (well, the released a
closed source version, but that's only for other operating systems).

This is a pity, since Moovida seems like a very good choice for weaker machines,
but I don't know of any effort to continue maintaining the 1.x series. Sad.

Finally, MythTV seems to insist in having a capture card installed in its
backend and, for that reason, I didn't go much further with it.

Any comments regarding this situation would be quite appreciated.


Thanks,

Rogério Brito.

- -- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://rb.doesntexist.org : Packages for LaTeX : algorithms.berlios.de
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br
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