Xinerama and an IBM ThinkPad T40

Fitting in the category of “it shouldn’t be this bloody hard” was getting my IBM ThinkPad T40 working in Xinerama mode under Linux. My laptop is currently setup with Redhat Linux 9.0 and all the latest updates. I’ve been wrestling with it for a while to get it working. Every site I’ve had a look at seems to have a slightly different setup in their XF86Config with never seemed to work for me. Most users who use Xinerama seem to be either Debian or Mandrake users, so that might be the reason.

Anyhow, here is my XF86Config file. Currently it only has support for doing straight Xinerama, nothing else. When I get the chance I’ll update it and write a script to detect the prescence of an external display using tpctl so it can decide whether to go dualhead or not.

Update: It would seem that cursors aren’t working correctly with them being displayed in black and white instead of the full colour that they’re supposed to. Also there appears to be a bug with Yahoo! Messenger with it hanging whenever someone messages me. 🙁

Update 20/02/04: Alright. No need to fudge around with detecting the second display. It would seem GDM (or is it XFree86?) is smart enough these days to figure out whether the second display is there or not.