i-am.ws

External Display at Boot

My notebook — a Fujitsu P7010D — is light and small, therefore, when not on the road, I use it with an external display and keyboard. Solaris 10 being my main OS, some careful timing is needed for when to press the Fn-F10 key while booting. It has to happen when X-Windows hasn't started yet. The display of the grub boot menu is always a good moment.

However, couple of days ago I discovered another method. I guess it's also valid for other notebooks and although I didn't test it yet, this little trick should work the same way when you run Linux. This is what I do: First of all connect all external devices, then open the laptop, press the power button, and now immediately close the laptop again. Result is that the BIOS detects this and will select the external display straight away. No need to press any function key anymore.

Posted at 05:33PM Jun 17, 2007 by WWWillem in Desktop  |