[El Mago]

Has anyone tried the monitor spanning hack with Panther? I have a 700MHz ibook and am wondering whether monitor spanning will still work with Panther?

[jokell82]

Since it's a setting that's changed in Open Firmware, I'm willing to bet that it doesn't matter what OS you have installed...

[El Mago]

That was my initial feeling, but I wanted to see if anyone had done it before I go and possibly kill my ibook. ....leave that to someone else

[Hi I'm Ben]

will someone explain what monitor explanding is? If it's cool i'll try it!

whocares if i kill my ibook!

[smic]

ya it works in panther (cant see any reason why it wouldnt)

moniter spanning is the ability to use 2 moniters, that arent mirrored
in this situation the ibook screen, and an external moniter

like i have a 17 studio display hooked up with a resolution of 1280x1024, and its sweet to have, since 12inches is small on a desk when im at home, and 2 moniters is cool for lots of apps

neat thing i found out, i can run VPC6 full screen on the ibook screen, and use my 17inch for osx, its like 2 different computers

[stew]

Originally posted by smic:
ya it works in panther (cant see any reason why it wouldnt)

The Radeon driver could simply disable it.

[El Mago]

Basically, I just don't to spend the time installing Panther to find that monitor spanning doesn't work. In which case, 10.2.6 for the ibook will have to do. w/o monitor spanning, I am nothing. It is like digital heroin.

[natan]

Originally posted by stew:
The Radeon driver could simply disable it.

I don't exactly see how they could pull that off without disabling it for other machines that DO support spanning (PowerBook, PowerMac).

[jokell82]

Originally posted by natan:
I don't exactly see how they could pull that off without disabling it for other machines that DO support spanning (PowerBook, PowerMac).

They couldn't.

[DefiantRonin]

It works just fine for me running all three released builds of Panther. I was demoing halo films all this weekend at a lan party with a projector, switching between mirrored and not.

If Apple wanted to, they could get ATI to disable it on a driver level useing a gesalt check on the hardware of some sort (if ibook, disable). As it stands, it just uses the standard driver that just sees a Rage M6 with two heads under system profiler.


Miles

[El Mago]

"If Apple wanted to, they could get ATI to disable it on a driver level useing a gesalt check on the hardware of some sort (if ibook, disable). As it stands, it just uses the standard driver that just sees a Rage M6 with two heads under system profiler."


Thanks for the explanation. I was wondering how exactly the "new" display preferences appeared, etc after putting in the hack.

[stew]

Originally posted by jokell82:
They couldn't.

Sure they could. Check the GestaltID and enable screen spanning only if the computer is a PowerBook. Heck, they could, if they really wanted to, check wether the CPU is a G4 and make it dependent on that.

edit: D'oh, I was beaten at that one. Note to self: First read, then post.

[El Mago]

Alright, I am convinced. I shall give it a go and board the upgrade train.