Adding USB SVGA
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).
Contents
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.
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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.
