I installed RHEL 5 on a HP Compaq 8510w. Everything runs fine until I go to dock the laptop on a docking station with an external monitor plugged into it.

When I turn the machine on while its on the docking station, at first I got a straight up error saying that X server wasn't configured properly, and that it had something to do with the mouse. So I took it off the docking station and was able to get it to boot up and I deleted the keyboard and mouse lines out of the xorg.conf. That fixed the error with the X server.

The problem now is that the laptop's screen is a different resolution then the external monitor. I want to know if there is a way to have that automatically change from the laptop being docked or not docked.

I know I can just go into the display settings, change the resolution, and restart X, but that isn't acceptable. This laptop is for a software engineer, and they are very specific on what they want, and this needs to work flawlessly.

So I'm wanting to know what I can do to fix this problem? Do I need to run some kind of script, or is there a way to just set this up in the xorg.conf file?

Any help or insight into this problem would be greatly appreciated.

I have a Thinkpad T61p. When I installed Kubuntu 8.04 on it, the laptop was not docked. The installation went through fine, and the laptop worked fine as well.

Then, I found the laptop would not work in the docking station. Eventually, I reconfigured X to use the vesa driver, instead of the NVIDIA driver. Now, the laptop undocked is good enough, and works quite well in the docking station.

For Red Hat, this might be the command to use

redhat-config-xfree86

On Kubuntu, I ran this in recovery mode, took all defaults, except the driver, and made sure there were plenty of modes, even SVGA, so I could get the display to work if something failed.