Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
Actually, OS X has great support for monitor spanning. In fact, for all the bad things about previous Mac OS versions, one thing that they always HAVE had is good multi-monitor support. It's just that apple seems to have disabled that feature JUST for the ibook.
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.
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.