I enjoy upgrading kernels in my Dell 700m laptop, the new kernel usually brings more functionalities and fixes bugs. In the recent upgrade to suspsend2-source-2.6.22, I found Fn + F7 VGA output does work any longer, which worked so perfect in suspend2-sources-2.6.18-r6 that I even regarded it as a built-in feature of BIOS. Right now, I need to explicitly call i855crt to output either shaking rawpipe or 8-bit color palette images to external monitor, both suck.

Maybe it required some other bleeding-edge components. I upgraded the x11-drm and xf86-video-i810 to the unstable ~x86 branch in the portage. Things got even worse. xf86-video-i810-2.0.0 could mirror screen to the external monitor if it was attached in X server launch, that suffice the need of presentation, however, there were two screen 1152×768 and 1280×800 sharing the same desktop in the sole head, that totally confused KDE, and windows’ behavior s were quite weired.

So I went back to xf86-video-i810-1.7.4 for the daily working environment, and reboot the machine to kernel 2.6.18-r6 for the presentation, — that is ridiculous but I could not stick to 2.6.18 kernel since the source tree is deleted, and also removed from the portage. What I have in the hand is the monolithic kernel only.

For the troubleshooting, I compared the .config of 2.6.18 and 2.6.22 head by head, and still could not figure it out what I did wrong. If you manage to make the VGA output work in 2.6.22 kernel, or point out the mistake I have made, please drop a comment here. Thanks.