Aug 10, '06 09:30:00AM • Contributed by: Mr. H
The problem is that even with the LCD removed, the motherboard still thinks that it is there. This means that you could run into a situation where the LCD is set as the main screen (with the menu-bar), and the external screen is set as a secondary display. Getting the menu-bar onto the external display using the GUI in this situation is pretty much impossible.
Here's what you need to do in order to guarantee that the external display will have the menu-bar:
- Download cscreen, a small command-line utility for manipulating displays, and save it to the root of your hard drive.
- Open Script Editor and write a short AppleScript along these lines:
The first line sets the display properties for both displays, in this case to 16-bit colour depth, with 800x600 resolution. The line inside the try statement checks to see if the LCD (which cscreen reports as having a refresh rate of 0) is set as the main screen (the main screen is listed first by cscreen when listing the current display settings). If it is, the next line sets the external display to have the menu bar, and thereby become the main screen.do shell script "/cscreen -d 16 -x 800 -y 600 -s a" set CurrentMode to "" try set CurrentMode to (do shell script ¬ "/cscreen -l | grep \" 1 16 800 600 0\"") end try if length of CurrentMode > 0 then ¬ do shell script "/cscreen -s 2 -p" - Save the script as an application, and then go to the Accounts preferences panel. Set it to run as a Login Item.
If you are going to do this, make sure you do it before removing the LCD. I've tested this on an original Titanium PowerBook G4 running 10.3.9. This should work on other configurations, but, as always, YMMV.
