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Is Monitor Spanning Possible on an iBook?

Posted by Cliff on from the two-heads-are-better-than-a-clone-of-one dept.

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?"

3 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Monitor Spanning fine in OS X by BitGeek · · Score: 3, Interesting


    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/ 1816257
  2. Copy the driver from a PowerBook onto your iMac by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  3. Apple isn't the only company... by batobin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.