Jdoe's Throwaway

For those  who, like me, are stuck with the nvidia binary drivers on their laptops.

I use external HDMI quite often to connect to external monitors, both in office and at home. The gnome “Monitors” thing fails to detect monitors, so that I needed to clicki-clicki through nvidia-settings to enable/disable the external monitor.

Where is my laptop panel??

Using nvidia-setting works, but requires at least 10-15 mouse clicks to enable the HDMI-attached one and disable the laptop panel. boring.

Disper

Disper is ??a switcher utility for nvidia cards. Works like a charm. I can switch to the laptop screen using disper -S and to the hdmi screen using disper -s. Cool. Keybinds Alt+F8 and CTRL+F8 is what I wanted.

Quick Howto

Download the code from launchpad or from tar

$ bzr branch lp:disper

then use cave to import in unpackaged

$ cd disper

$ make DESTDIR=/tmp/diper-root install

$ sudo chwon -R root:root /tmp/disper-root

$ sudo cave import -l /tmp/disper-root media-video/disper scm -x

At this point check if disper really works for you and how. Write down used commands

To enable keybindings, simply open gconf-editor, and then:

• go to apps -> metacity ->keybinding_commands
• Double click on command_1 and enter the command to enable the external monitor (in my case /usr/bin/disper -s)
• Do the same for command_2 with the command to enable the laptop panel.
• Go to ??apps -> metacity -> global_keybindings
• Double click on command_1 and enter <Alt>+F8 (note, the <> are needed for special keys)
• Double click on command_2 and enter <Ctrl>+F8
• Done