A potted account of Ross' life

Maybe atitvout may help [1]. It is unmaintained, but there are some patches somewere on the web (if I remember well...).

[1] - http://0pointer.de/lennart/projects/atitvout/

I think you should check this page:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Atitvout

I've tried atitvout.  It says "VBE extension not supported" when I try it.  Probably due to the home page saying "works NOT with xorg > xorg-6.7" and "This tool does not work with recent ATI video cards".

Ive found that with a few cards (this is a few years back) you actually need the tv attached when X starts, rather than trying to do it later.

If you use the "radeon" driver instead you can add

Option  "BIOSHotkeys" "on"

to your xorg.conf. Perhaps this works with fglrx too. (This is on an IBM X31 running Dapper)

I remembered well :). One of these [1] gentoo patches should fix the issues with the ati mobility 9000, which is the gpu in your T40p, isn't it?

[1] - http://www.die.unipd.it/pub/Linux/distributions/gentoo-sources/distfiles/atitvout-0.4-patches.tar.bz2

Ops, if you are using xorg these patches are probably useless...

Have you tried the ibm-acpi kernel driver? I'm not sure if it's the only thing needed, but it adds support for the Fn key combinations.

atitvout used to do it for me on my T40, before Ubuntu put Xorg on it instead of XFree86.  here's the two scripts I used:

tvout:

sudo /usr/X11R6/bin/X :1 -xf86config /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.vesa \
  -depth 24 -auth /var/gdm/:1.Xauth vt8 &
DISPLAY=:1.0
export DISPLAY
sleep 2
xterm &
sleep 5
sudo atitvout ntsc
sudo atitvout -f t


tvoff:

sudo atitvout -f l



"tvout" to start up the tv-out interface with an xterm on it, then "tvoff" when you're done.

Note that you need to power-cycle the laptop with the tv-out hooked up, for it to work.  that was the main reason I eventually just got a MythTV box built instead to watch videos on. ;)

Did you try the proprietary fglrx driver?
See http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Fglrx

As seen here:
http://www.ati.com/products/catalyst/linux.html#1
the proprietary driver supports tv out.

oh! /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.vesa is at: http://taint.org/xfer/2006/XF86Config-4.vesa

As I understand (never actually had an ATI card) there should be a GUI tool called something like fglrx-control (or something) that controls all the details of setting tv-out, double head, and so on.

Renato: as I said, I'm already using fglrx.

This may not be applicable...

Back when I was using my old Thinkpad A22p (r128), I had to use atitvout.  But that alone wasn't sufficient.  I also had to run X using the vesa driver to get output to the TV.  That sucked hard.  Hopefully you have better luck, but as far as documenting the hardware, ATI gives some BS copy-protection argument as to why it needs to be secret.

How about switching to X.org and trying these patches:

http://megahurts.dk/rune/tv_output.html

You might get TV out working and free yourself of some proprietary drivers!

(Disclaimer: I have successfully compiled those patches with X but I haven't had a chance to test TV-out with them)

As far as I recall, the following in the Device section of xorg.conf worked for me:

  Option  "NoTV" "no"
  Option "TVFormat"  "PAL-D"
  Option  "TVHSizeAdj" "0"
  Option  "TVVSizeAdj" "0"
  Option "TVHPosAdj"  "0"
  Option "TVVPosAdj"  "100"
  Option "TVHStartAdj"  "0"
  Option "TVColorAdj"  "0"
  Option "GammaCorrectionI"  "0x06419064"
  Option "GammaCorrectionII"  "0x06419064"

It was created by ATIs tool to control a FireGL something on my compaq nw8000.

Go to http://www.ebay.co.uk/ and set up an account.  They can help you sell your laptop.  Then buy yourself a new laptop which doesn't have an ATI chipset.

^^  I have to agree with Troll #1.

Propriatory drivers suck. And given that out of the vendors that offer propriatory drivers ATI is by far the very worst choice.. it just makes it that much worse.

If ATI had half a brain they'd should start throwing documentation and probably developers at the http://r300.sourceforge.net/ folks right_now. I would personally run out and buy a card from them immediately just to show my appreciation.

But of course they are morons and continue with their in-house vastly inferior drivers compared to their only competitor.

Next time buy a thing with a Nvidia card or better yet a Intel embedded style card. At least with Intel they use fully open source drivers and people have hacked tv support into them time to time to get it to work. The 'GMA' 915/945-based devices are actually quite a bit nicer then their older 'Blaster Extreme' 855 stuff.

Otherwise pray to the ATI driver gods in their propriatory towers that they happen to glance down in your direction sometime this decade and get what you want to work in between more important tasks like tweaking their Vista drivers for a 3% FPS improvement in some obscure gaming benchmark.

http://www.rage3d.com/board/forumdisplay.php?f=61
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_TV-Out#ATI-drivers
very good:
http://odin.prohosting.com/wedge01/gentoo-radeon-faq.html#4_tvout

Good luck on that. Don't get me wrong, I am on your side... it's just that it doesn't realy seem worth it to put up with this sort of crap. It would be nice if either Nvidia or ATI or a smaller  3rd-level manufacturer (like Matrox or XGI) didn't dick Linux users around like they currently do. It's sad that a Intel 945gm provides the premier 3d performance for free software Linux systems.

The Fn+F7 button does not do anything on Ubuntu:

# /etc/acpi/events/ibmvideobtn
# This is called when the user presses the video button. It is currently
# a placeholder.

event=ibm/hotkey HKEY 00000080 00001007
action=/bin/true

You will need to write some appropriate script and point the action line to it.