[TriLUG] automatic setup of external monitor?

[Kevin Hunter]

Hullo Fellow TriLUG folks,

About a month ago, I finally had the opportunity and courage to retry my 
machine in a multi-screen environment.  The last time I went through 
this, I had to do xorg.conf hacking and switching of files every time I 
un/plugged an external monitor in to my machine.  So I was pleasantly 
surprised when, for the most part, it Just Worked.  Awesome.  (System 
reference.[1])

But now that the mouse has a cookie, he wants more: automatic 
recognition and setup of an external monitor.

For instance, I know that Mac OSX has had this capability for at least 5 
years.  I could plug in the DPMI connector, wait a few seconds, and 
there it was.  It even worked with a VGA->DPMI connector.  What's 
preventing Ubuntu from having this capability?

Currently, my progression is this:

  1. I plug in the monitor.  (The monitor is aware if this action
     as the blue power light changes status.)
  2. I click on System->Preferences->Display (on laptop display)
  3. It asks "Do you want to use your graphics driver vendor's
     tool instead?"  I click Yes
  4. I then use NVidia's tool to enable this monitor, and place
     it "left of" my laptop screen.
  5. Finally I click apply, then quit.

I want to execute step 1, and have the rest just happen, according to 
default and pre-defined settings.  What have y'all figured out in this 
arena?

Thanks,

Kevin

[1]
$ lspci | grep VGA; dpkg -l "*nvidia-glx*" | grep ii; lsb_release -a
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8400M GS 
(rev a1)

ii  nvidia-glx-180      180.44-0ubuntu1      NVIDIA binary Xorg driver

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 9.04
Release:        9.04
Codename:       jaunty