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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 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.
Has anyone tried the OSX version of SwitchRes? No guarantees but it fixes a number of OSX video settings "features".
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.
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.