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Is Monitor Spanning Possible on an iBook?
bcassell asks: "I just recently (a few days ago) purchased an iBook. It's the base model (600mhz, 12" screen). After playing with it for a while I decided to plug it into my nice 21" Dell CRT, only to find that the iBook ONLY supports display mirroring (so I'm stuck at 1024x768). Well, knowing that the video card in my iBook is an ATI Radeon mobility which, by ATI's specs, supports monitor spanning, I decided to do some research. I found several discussions about the subject, and one person who even claimed to have monitor spanning working on his iBook in Mac OS 9. So does anyone know of a way to get monitor spanning to work on an iBook in Mac OS X? Or, if not, where would a very proficient coder/hacker like myself, who has very little Mac OS X experience, find information to attempt a hack like this?"
I have a 700mhz iBook, and I absolutely love it, best machine I've ever owned, OSX runs like a dream on it. However, monitor spanning would make it that much cooler....
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
even though it is easy and cheap to include such a feature. apple won't do it. doing that would prevent "serious users" (read: users with cash burning a hole in their pocket) from buying their $3000 machine in favor of their $1500 one.
welcome to apple. bend over.
A steam roller should span out your monitor to a good size.
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
I came across the same info myself- same chip as in older PowerBooks which had the ability to monitor-span. I've a feeling that it's disabled as a part of the driver- to give people a reason to get a PB over an iBook, I suppose.
:)
To get it to work with the iBook, I imagine you'd have to write a new driver for OS X. Perhaps the ATI 128 driver from Linux and docs from ATI (specs) and Apple (DDK, monitors-api for OS X) should be enough? Apple may have done something to disable this feature on the chip itself, or perhaps in OpenFirmware, but I pray that it's just an issue of drivers.
Can Linux/X11 use monitor spanning on a PowerBook with the same chip as in the iBook? If that's the case, perhaps the next step to determine if it's just a gimpy driver in OS X or something in HW/firmware would be to see if the same technique to get dual-head setup for a PowerBook works for the iBook with the same gfx chipset.
Many iBook owners will be forever in your debt if you got this to work. Myself included, at least until I sell my iBook to get an OQO for running Dynapad.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
You might try posting this question to the forums at www.xlr8yourmac.com (did you know you can overclock your iBook via software?). There's also a similar thread on the iBook forum at apple.com, though the only answers so far there is to buy a PowerBook instead.
So I understand you followed the guy's instructions and they didn't work? Have you checked ATI's website for updated drivers?
But jeez, the software. For years, they've been stuck with an antiquated, non-multitasking OS with a bloated, overdesigned API. Now, among the few little things I found to admire about MacOS were monitor spanning and adherence to the Apple HUIG. But apparently OS X supports neither! That's just sad.
also was there any way to follow his instructions without the OS 9 path? It sounded perhaps as if having OS 9 merely helped him discover it.
Why is this under hardware and not "ask slashdot?"
Also, i blocked everything apple and i still get these topics where they don't belong, like here...
Please put the stories where they belong.
http://www.petitiononline.com/ibook/petition.html
People. The terminology is not called monitor spanning. Apple has had multi monitor support since the late 80's. Just turn your machine off, plug another card in, hook up a monitor and reboot. Then open the monitors control panel and arrainge your monitors. This is simply "multiple monitor support" and should be called such. In 1991, I had 4 monitors on my MacII FX just to see if it could be done.
I do have a mac g3 500 powerbook and a g3 266 powerbook and multiple monitor support is only provided on the g3 500. If you have a pci slot, I bet you could get a pci video card, something I'd love to do. I really want to be able to have 3 monitors on my laptop.
Remember "Multiple Monitor Support."
Thanks.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Apple seems to have made the consumer models non-spanning (imac,emac, ibook). If you look at the specs of the models on apple's web page it says mirroring only.
IThe ibook doesn't allow spanning AND you can't increase the resolution on an external monitor past what the ibooks flat panel is. It's a great little portable machine, but lowsy if you can only run the 19"inch monitor at the same resolution as the flat panel.
I like apple, but intentionally hobbling there machines like this is inexcusable. I won't buy a new one until they change there ways.
Yeah, this is VERY annoying. The thing is, it's VERY probable that the solution to both getting an external monitor to run independantly of the built in display, and getting monitor spanning working (or multi-monitor support, for the guy who posted before you =p) are the same solution. And why run just the external monitor when you can run both? =P
> I won't buy a new one until they change there ways.
Oh please, you just can't afford one with the feature. I've seen posts like this for decades and they're all LIES.
BTW it's their, not there
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
I inhereted one of the newer model ibooks, and promptly ditched Mas OS for YDL. I don't use it much, but when I saw this thread I figured i'd be a good place to ask if the multi monitor would work using linux (yellow Dog or another PPC version) since it seems to have been neutered from Apple's offerings.
It works fine in OS X, its just not supported on that model.
It could be for a number of reasons- a software issue, memory issue, of a hardware design compromise that was necessary to save costs on the iBook.
The idea that apple deliberately disabled it seems paranoid... but it certainly works on OS X on machines that do support it.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Copy the drivers, first, in OS X.
Then boot into console mode. Single user, as it were.
Back up the originals, then copy over with the PowerBook drivers.
I imagine this would work.
If it doesn't, I guess you reinstall OS X?
GPL Deconstructed
Has anyone tried the OSX version of SwitchRes? No guarantees but it fixes a number of OSX video settings "features".
IIRC, Monitor Spanning is the special case of Multiple Monitor Support where you have displays with the same geometry and color depth settings, with one big rectangular desktop.
I've got a nice little setup going with a 15" monitor in 16-bit mode at 1024x768 positioned off the bottom left corner of my main 21" 1280x1024 32-bit mode main display. I use the tiny one for full-time e-mail. That's multiple monitor suppport as I understand it. I'm not sure about Windows, but X's Xinerama has only begun to know how to deal with this, since the port of XFree86 to OSX made it necessary. Macs, of course, have had no trouble doing it since a mac with slots was introduced. ('86?)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I've been eagerly waiting for some Mac OS X guru to spit out the answer, but in the meanwhile perhaps some Linux guru can tell us how we'd do this in XWindows? Maybe we could try and hack it in Darwin w/ X11.
/. story.
:^)
For those who have posted that it seems that Apple wouldn't do this deliberately, I believe the point of the article is that they have. If you steal the right components from certain versions of OS 9, *poof*, you've got monitor spanning on iBook hardware. This is a limitation created by software -- purposefully. The extensions the link has you moving around are similar to trading for different versions of dll's on Windows, and basically the hack makes OS 9 treat the iBook hardware in a more generic, non-disabled fashion.
I haven't tried the OS 9 hack on my 'book just yet, but if the page ain't lying, Apple has disabled spanning on the iBook in software though the hardware could do it. Wouldn't be the first time Apple didn't want you to access hardware that's in your system -- remember when Apple removed the Mezzanine slot from the Rev. C (iirc) iMac so that you couldn't install a Voodoo2 any more?
And isn't a Celeron chip just a Pentium III with a poor yield? Intel just smacks out half the cache and *poof*, same chip in a lower price range -- great for over-clocking once you learn that's what's going on (though my 533 didn't behave). And there was also the PDA with flash-rom disabled in a recent
Point is, yes Virginia, companies purposefully disable or don't advertise features of hardware quite often so that they can pitch it to a "lower niche audience". But danged if I don't enjoy my iBook anyway.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
poke around in /System/Library/MonitorPanels. there's a bunch of nibs and even one with a "Mirror Displays" checkbox, but having just the nibs isn't much help. anyone care to dig a little further?
matt
Perhaps you are confusing a Mac with a Windows machine. I can take a single install of Mac OS X on a firewire drive, and boot an iMac, iBook, powerbook, or tower from it. Likely an X-Serve too but I haven't had the chance. ... copy drivers. You can copy the OS, it doesn't change the fact that the iBook spans monitors during boot, but not once the full windowing system is up and running.
Drivers. Sheesh. You could say they ar all there, or there aren't any drivers, but in the end, copying them is useless, as they only work on hardware they identify as appropriate.
I do rember one thing that was mentioned when OS X came to life. It's BSD with a cute interface. Gee, I wonder if ctl + alt + Backspace kills the X server? Gee, If it uses X then all that you need to do is hack the config files to load the server you want. Then hack the another file to get the system to think the server is the one that MAC. wrote. (You know that Mac programmers allways has a watchdog thatlimits you to use only MAC system software.) Geez, Is this getting complicated? That is why Mac has the small market share that they have. People like to mess around with their OS. Mac Says No! We say I Paid for it, It's mine! Even that rich guy in Redmond barrowed a little bit of BSD this last time arround. Did I say the "M" word! I guess if you loaded BSD on the system and set it up the way you like it, than you would know what modules to use and how the X server is setup. There is a console in MAC OS X. Try using it. I never said it was easy. Rember to back up your files to tape! OH! Sorry! I forgot, It's a MAC.
I read through the posting hoping that someone would ask about the new 17" iMac. It has an NVIDIA GeForce4 MX like the desktop G4s that support spanning I would like to think it might have a fix very much like the iBook fix.
There are a lot of people criticizing Apple for purposefully limiting this feature. To these people I would point out the fact that Apple isn't the only company to do this. For example, processor companies sell thousands of chips that are identical, except for their clockrate. Many processor batches are so stable that they can be turned into whatever people will pay for. In fact, Intel used to take a batch of Pentium 2 chips, give half of them half as much L2 cache, and sell them as Celerons. At heart, however, they were still just Pentium 2s.
Apple's no better than the rest of the industry, but they certainly aren't any worse.
Just recently we had a discussion at the University about how to run a PowerBook with the lid closed. It wouldn't be the same as multi-monitor support, but it would be interesting if you could exceed the iBook's resolution max.
To try, attach a USB keyboard & mouse to the machine and put it to sleep. Attach the monitor and then use the keyboard to wake it. The iBook's LCD display should be disabled with the external becoming the primary.
This would be extremely hard to do; the drivers are proprietary and as such I don't believe they are in the Darwin "project." You would have to reverse engineer something, or better yet, find similar drivers (for this chipset) in other projects.
It couldn't hurt to poke around in Darwin though...
I'd be willing to try that file, if you'll e-mail me it.
I have an iBook 600, late 2001 model, that have the older Rage video chipsets. I have read about someone getting these thing either spanning or at least outputting to the VGA port at a higher resoultion in XFree a while ago.
I am running 10.2 now, however I'm willing to install 10.1.5 into a spare partiton to test this, if you're willing to e-mail me the file.
Thanks in advance, Mr Post.
When I upgraded a Sony XG-18 from Win 98 to Win XP, I lost the dual monitor (spanning) capability. This of course was NOT documented anywhere on the web or with any MSFT resources (nor did they know anything about it on the tech support phone).
r es.com
After figuring out that they decided to cut this feature out on the Sony (and most all laptops from what I know) due to the difficulty of getting XP to support all of the different video chipsets, I was forced to buy an Appian Traveller card for ~$300 (if I remember the $) to put in the docking station PC card (in order to drive the external LCD monitor as a spanned display.
IMHO this cost was totally unnecessary and one of those hidden XP upgrade costs. (don't flame me on OSs because I run OX X, various Linuxes, etc., etc. for my work/testing). In the end the cost was necessary but I don't see this as you do (i.e. an AAPL screw you policy/limitation).
The more you pay the more you get. Video chipsets and support in the OS has become more expensive part of the system overall.
David H. Park
www.tapdoleventures.com
david@tadpoleventu
Macs have had multitasking since System 6 and Multifinder, and the reason for such comprehensive APIs is so that every programmer doesn't have to reinvent the wheel.
The Mac has supported multiple monitors since 1987 -- as many as six on a single machine -- and OS X definitely supports multiple monitors. The complaint is that Apple has written the drivers to prevent multiple monitor support on the iBook, not that OS X doesn't support multiple monitors.
Get on the clue train before you comment on things you don't understand. That's just sad.
Anne Onymus, rumor monger
first, this is possible. monitor spanning can and has been done on iBooks under OS9 and OSX.
seems it's a software limit in the OS for the hardware.
try this site for an account of someone who's done it.
Can you say Geee four Titanium Power book?
The pref to enable this feature is stored in the following file: ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.windowserve r.[random hex value].plist
/Developer/Applications to edit this file. Unfortunately, instead of just having something that tells it to mirror or span, there is a ton of really complicated information about each monitor connected to the system in there. If you want a copy of mine, send me an email, but let me know the resolutions you're running first, because if you don't, you'll have stuff going off the edge of your iBook's screen, and your external will be set to 1280x1024.
On my system, the file is com.apple.windowserver.003065f5a262.plist
If you have the Developer Tools installed, you can use the Property List Editor, which is in
Karma: Ran over your dogma.
I've been told the Raedeon chip on the iBook itself is not a stock, off the shelf chip - the spanning is actually disabled on a hardware level, on the chip itself (maybe they're cheaper/smaller this way?)
I wouldn't believe anyone that say theyve gotten that working on the iBook 'till I see the code to do it.
I should have said "pre-emptive multitasking". MacOS 9 and earlier (and also Windows previous to Windows 95) only support a sort of voluntary multitasking, which assumes that all programs are well-behaved and give up the CPU when the don't need it. Since programs are rarely that well-written, it doesn't work very well. Serious OSs (like Unix) consider pre-emptive multitasking a basic feature.
I beg to differ. Mac multitasking may not be as buzzword compliant as preemptive multitasking, but rest assured that it worked, continues to work in the classic Mac OS, and generally works very well. It does the important thing: lets users have several programs up and running concurrently and switch among them, thereby letting them be productive.
Sure, preemptive multitasking is nicer when you run into a poorly behaved application, but that doesn't mean that concurrent multitasking sucks.
Anne
....is to get a higher resolution. This is why connecting my calculator to a projector doesn't let me see more details in mario.
Please don't tell Ms. Deaton, the teacher of Adv. pre Calculus at JCHS that I, Travis Goodspeed, the only sophomore in the class, used her overhead projector to play mario during fourth period onaugust 22, 2002. Feel free to suggest that she replace the TI-86 projector with a TI-89 projector.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Great, So I have to buy a 2500$+ g4 ti book to get a higher resolution than the screen? I actually like my ibook's small size over the bigger ti book.
/off. With the screen off and a external monitor set up I could change the resolution of the monitor to greater than that of the computer.. Why can't the ibook do this?
that my cheapy 200 mhz PC notebook with a simple fn f2 could toggle the internal screen on
"The problem isn't Apple; the problem is that you don't give them enough money."
The feature is there, it's part of the chip. The feature was crippled. That sucks.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
http://macparts.de/ibook
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
That's better!
Isn't that like military intelligence?
For those of you old enough to remember, the Amiga had preemptive multitasking from day one. It worked much better than Classic/OS9's "background processing."
That was one of my first gripes when I sold my beloved Amiga 3000 and got a PowerMac 6100 the first week they were out.
--- If you hadn't stayed to read this
Please, boneheads, do not post yet another link to
http://macparts.de/ibook/
That's the link that's IN THE FUCKING ARTICLE TO START WITH!!!
You don't have to have displays with the same geometry and color-depth to do Monitor Spanning (at least not in MacOS, or NeXTStep). For mirroring, of course you do, since the fact that they are same requires the same resolution ;-)
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Let Apple know about the demand and sign the petition !
Might as well get it done officially if we can...
I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with my post...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I have a 700Mhz ibook with radeon, and on two occasions monitor spanning has occured, apparently as a bug.
What I did was the following (although I've not been able to recreate it reliably): After booting the ibook, I plug in the vga adaptor cable. Then I plug the vga cable into it - while the monitor is turned off. At this point (or when the adaptor was plugged in? Don't know for sure) the ibook display switches to 800x600 50Hz (as when connecting a pal television). I then turn on the monitor, and select detect displays from the display menu in the menu bar. (Note, this is under OS 10.2 Jaguar) Voila! The external monitor extends my desktop.
I put a screenshot here.
You can get multiple monitors working for a few seconds if you boot up your iBook in verbose mode (Command - V). While the console is displayed on the main monitor, the external monitor is greyed out. Not turned off, but grey. So the iBook is clearly drawing *something* different on the external monitor. Once the Finder starts loading, the screens sync up though.