Running Linux 2.6 and Fedora Core 2 / 3 on the IBM ThinkPad T41
Alex Fedosov

[ overview ] [ video ] [ frequency scaling ] [ suspend ] [ ACPI ] [ TV out ] [ other ]

This is a very useful feature, but I don't currently have a good way of making it work right.

[ X.org driver ] [ fglrx (ATI proprietary driver) ] [ GATOS ]

X.org driver
Limited (but surprisingly most) success. There are two tricks: you must have TV out plugged in when you turn on the laptop (I guess for BIOS to enable it) and you must use 1024x768 or lesser resolution. Then use the atitvout tool to redirect output to the TV screen with: 
# ./atitvout -f t
Unfortunately, with this approach you only get output on the TV screen or the LCD panel, but not both. So to switch back to LCD: 
# ./atitvout -f l
And everything would be perfect, except for one annoying problem: the colors get messed up. (Especially when you try moving the mouse -- so if you are trying to watch a movie, just use the keyboard.) This seems to be a bug in the X.org driver since I get the same behavior on my Dell laptop (also a radeon video card) but it worked just fine with FC1 and XFree86.


fglrx (ATI proprietary driver)
Very limited success. It appears that the TV output is working, but the TV screen gets messed up, as if it was wrong TV standard (PAL instead of NTSC.) I tried different output options, but they didn't make any difference.


GATOS
No luck. I tried downloading the binaries from the GATOS project, and although they work ok otherwise, there is absolutely no signal being output to TV. In addition, DRI does not seem to work. I didn't feel like compiling from source, since their stuff is all for XFree86, not X.org. Also, the kernel driver doesn't compile under 2.6.



Last modified Friday July 30, 2004
Alex Fedosov
Department of Computer Science, University of San Francisco