Adding USB SVGA

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Revision as of 14:49, 6 October 2010 by 173.12.75.9 (talk)
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On XO-1.5 and using recent Operating Systems, it is easy to make a USB2VGA adapter work. Using USB2VGA adapters slows your XO down, and has some limitations (see below for details).

Selecting the right USB-SVGA adapter

This technique is supported with some USB-SVGA adapters based on the SIS USB-SVGA device, which uses the 'sisusbvga'(kernel) and 'sisusb'(xorg) drivers.

This driver supports cards based on the Net2280/SiS315 chipset, according to the author's page here. Some devices reported to work according to the NSLU2 wiki

Using lsusb, we have seen these identifiers on devices that work:

 Bus 004 Device 005: ID 0711:0900 Magic Control Technology Corp. SVGA Adapter

Important notice : In older OSs, unless you compiled the sisusbvga module for your kernel, the module can possibly not be fully powered on, do not think the XO is not powerful enough to handle it, just insert the module to make sure it gets powered on.

On XO OS 10.1.3 or newer

Just plug the USB2VGA device to the XO, and start it up (or restart it if it is on). The desktop will appear smaller on the LCD of the XO, becasue it will be a 1024x768 desktop.

On XO OS 10.1.1 and 10.1.2

You will need to install some required modules from the main repositories

yum install xorg-x11-sisusb xorg-x11-server-Xephyr

And then a test RPM that contains the required auto-configuration scripts

yum install http://dev.laptop.org/~martin/test-usbvga/olpc-utils-1.0.29-1.fc11.i586.rpm

Connect the USB SVGA adapter, and restart your XO.

On XO OS 8.2.1 and earlier

The process is more complex as you will have to compile kernel and xorg modules. See [[Adding_USB_SVGA/Fedora_9_and_earlier]

Pictures

Here are some pictures of the OLPC working with the USB-SVGA adapter.


Other Resources

See Remote display for other ways to connect a second display to an XO.

This thread has instructions that may be useful if you are running an alternate Linux distribution on your XO.