Every so often I take advantage of the 20" flat-panel monitor on the floor in the corner of my office. I plug it into the vga ouput on my laptop and happily watch a flick on Crackle or Netflix. Whereas using nvidia-settings is OK, if not a little touchy, I have recently discovered disper and I dig it. It's certainly handy and handier still is adding a keybind for it in your favorite window manager/desktop environment.

disper is a handy display switcher, in case you haven't already figured that out ;). I got the source here. It installed with no error on my squeeze machine. I extracted the program, cd'd into the directory and ran make install as root. Then I ran it without argument from my terminal-fu and was shown the standard [-h, --help] list of options. From there it was easy, I wanted the secondary display only to run (the fancy 20"), so I ran disper like this:

disper --scaling=aspect-scaled -S.

If you run the same but with a lower-case s your main display will come back and the secondary one will shut off. Cool. Very cool. I couldn't do this on my laptop with or without nvidia-settings.

To get your handy keybind you add something like this to your ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml:

Change the keys as you see fit, I used d for the dell display and h for my HP laptop display. You folks running Gnome or KDE or Xfce or LXDE or... whatever it is that you run, I'm sure you know where the handy keyboard gui app is, or which config file to change.

I'm very happy with this app. It's an install, set the keybind, and forget app. Cool.