In the spirit of reuse, I've installed Debian (version 6.0.5 "squeeze") on my wife’s old Macbook Pro (circa 2009 or so), to repurpose it for various tasks. The catch is the display is flaky. It will last a random amount of time, between 2 minutes and 2 hours, before freezing and graying out. This is a known issue with that generation of MBP. Fortunately it’s no problem for me, as I plan to use it with an external monitor anyway. Which brings us to the problem:

How do I configure this thing to output to the external display by default, and hopefully disable the built-in LCD?

The ideal solution would be to modify a setting in the EFI (BIOS), but I’m not holding out much hope for that. Next best thing would be a kernel option I can pass to the NVIDIA driver.

What won’t work is a solution that doesn’t give me a display until X starts. I need to have console access, especially given that the built-in LCD is dying, and any day now might give out completely. So far I haven’t been able to find anything online.

lspci says I’ve got an

NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 

Help is much appreciated!

Eric

PS if this question is better suited to the Unix & Linux area, pls advise and I will move it.