[lug] Portable monitors

[Nate Duehr]

Daniel Webb wrote:
> There are many times I need a small portable monitor to work on headless
> machines.  What do you do for this?  I've worked on clusters, I have a
> headless server at home, and some of the old laptops I buy for
> music/web/voip/etc servers have broken screens (but work with external
> monitor).  I've always just lugged a full-size monitor to wherever I need it,
> but come on, that's lame.

I've always wished some laptop manufacturer would offer a "montior and 
keyboard mode" directly from the laptop... shut down the laptop on board 
computer (or have a soft-switch of some kind) and have ports to plug 
cables into whatever you're attempting to work on.

Seems like that'd be a feature that techies everywhere would demand, if 
one manufacturer would start it.  Sounds like something that would go 
well on laptops like the Panasonic Toughbooks that people tend to buy 
for field engineering/technical folks.

> Sounds like an "ask Slashdot" question, eh?

Yeah.

> In the worst case, anyone have an older/smaller VGA LCD monitor they'll part
> with cheap?  I've been lugging around a 40 pound CRT for the last 5 years and
> want to get rid of it.

I started dropping cheap < $20 14" CRTs at all the remote sites along 
with a < $5 keyboard.  Doing any serious length work on them sucks, but 
I can at least get the box(es) booted and happy with that and then SSH 
in from the laptop, plugged into the Ethernet switch on-site.

Nate