Murillo Fernandes Bernardes

I have a Thinkpad T42 with a "ATI Mobility FireGL 9000". It has a TV-out port but it doesn't work
out of the box on linux.

I've used the proprietary driver to get that working, but that was too much work. I was using the open source driver on day-by-day basis, and changing to the proprietary driver only when using TV-out. Things got worse when new packages of the proprietary driver came and it stopped working, then I figured out that support for my card was dropped, as it's "too" old.

After a while, and the new series season started, I decided I had to get it working again, period :)

Finally I got. I'm using Ubuntu Gutsy, Xorg 7.3 (1.3.0), and Xrandr is the answer.

To enable S-video detection you gotta run:

To enable S-video output:

Note that S-video output is 800x600 and looks like you can't/shouldn't change. So you will get your desktop on TV also, but it will have a different screen size (I do hope you're not using 800x600 nowadays... hehe).

To get your screen size compatible with your TV output, and to make Xv work without any other step just run:

This will disable the Thinkpad LCD display.

Now you can run mplayer/xine/whatever and it will correctly shows up on your TV.

To enable the thinkpad LCD again:

And to turn Tv-out off:

That's it.