MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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My laptop graphics chip appears to have decided that it's slightly cooked itself. Now I can use the laptop with an external monitor but not the actual LCD itself (I'm 100% that it's the gfx chip that's having a paddy not the LCD despite how strange it all sounds). Windows is working fine and doesn't mind me hitting the button to move over from LCD to external display however ubuntu throws a fit as it really wants to use the LCD - probably to do with my config scripts but that's useless as I can't change them without the LCD being active so I want to reinstall ubuntu but I know that it won't like having the LCD still active behind the scenes!
My question is; if I remove the connector that plugs the LCD into the graphics then will the laptop use an external monitor as default as it can't pick up the LCD or is the use of the LCD built into the hardware?
Can't you connect it to a (wired) network, and telnet/ssh into ubuntu? Or even use the serial port if it has one (does linux have a terminal on the serial port?) and then alter the config files to tell it to use the other display?
Or access the ubuntu partition from windows (using something like this
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/03/19/four-applications-for-accessing-ext3-partitions-from-windows/
Sometimes you can set which display to use for startup in the bios - but that might be hard to navigate to if it doesn't show on the external screen.
Joe
You do make a good point there, the problem being that ssh isn't turned on and whilst I can change the display for startup ubuntu seems to just default back to LCD...I'll give it another poke though.
Accessing through windows is a good idea - I hadn't realised that there were programs that let you write to the partition as well as read! 🙂
From experience of Dell's the coding is not built into the hard ware, if you remove the lcd thn it will default into the external supply. It common on gefore 7000 series in laptops to do this, the internal one graphics go goodbye but will display on external graphics. You can get away will just pulling the connector loose and so still having it look like a decent laptop.
Excellent, cheers - I'm running a Dell Vostro 1400 and it's got a geforce 8400 which is apparantly quite common to melting. Good to know that I'm safe to just pull off the connector 🙂
is it completely dead on the main lcd or just artfacts? there used to be a seller on ebay who could repair ones that still had a little life in them.
It's quite bizarre really, sometimes the LCD will come on fine but 90% of the time the LCD is totally dead. The external display sometimes has artifacts during boot but then they go once into windows. Ubuntu will sometimes go through the boot process on the external then magically manage to get the LCD to turn on but the system crashes if I do anything that requires the gfx chip to do something a little bit complex.
I think that I'll just turn it into a desktop machine and use a monitor - can't afford to fix or replace it and I don't really travel with it much anyway!
sounds exactly like my dell 1710, if you go down the route of turning into a desktop... i would say it will on day die, and personally i would remove the lcd and sell it on ebay! will get you some cash!
That's a good plan - shall do that!
Depends on the distro but I think Debian based distros export a terminal to TTYS0 so you can just throw a dumb terminal or null modem lead on to the box if needs be.