Thursday 17 February 2011

Fix External Display issues (mirrored) with Hackintosh [Dell 10v mini]


Hi,

I recently bought a Hackintosh (Dell 10v Mini with Snow Leopard installed) to do some iPhone development. It almost becomes necessary to attach an external monitor to the system to see all of XCode interfaces.

Warning: Do not click mirror displays

If your still reading, that means you have clicked mirrored displays, and you are getting either:

1. Random lines/bugged image on the notebook screen, and the external monitor either showing the same, on standby or showing signal out of range.
2. Dell mini LCD displays solid white and even when unplugging the monitor, it remains until you do a hard reset.
3. Other annoying things.


So, you may have noticed you can't turn off mirroring until you have an external display attached, even more annoying right? Initially I located all com.apple.WindowServer* files and set the mirroring property to '0'. This works, but it can take a while.

Heres a better solution!
http://www.fabiancanas.com/Projects/MirrorDisplays/

Just run the application, the terminal window will say it has been processed successfully. Then simply plug in your external monitor. Great!