What next?

[Rodd Clarkson]

On Thu, 2005-06-02 at 13:42 -0400, Andrew Overholt wrote:
> * Steven Garrity <stevelist at silverorange.com> [2005-06-01 20:04]:
> > Kaj J. Niemi wrote:
> > >I would like automatic second display support (when connecting your
> > >laptop to a projector for example). So far I haven't been able to figure
> > >out how to do it except restart X with different settings. IMHO, it's one
> > >feature Apple's Powerbooks do really well running OS X.
> > 
> > After watching the video of the talks from Guadec, you can see that this 
> > is a big problem. Almost every talk started off with 5 or 10 minutes of 
> > fiddling to get the video-to-projector working. In some cases, the 
> > presentation went on with partially broken displays.
> 
> I think part of the problem here was xrandr.  It seemed that when using the
> dynamic resolution switching app (which I think uses xrandr), things didn't
> work.  We ended up having to restart X using the resolution we wanted and
> get the technician to re-sync the projector before our stuff worked (and by
> 'worked' I mean 'worked for all but ~5% of the bottom of the screen' ;) .

My wife's Linux based laptop (a HP running FC2) with 1024x768 resolution
just works with projectors.  She plugs the projector into the back and
then uses the Fn-<toggle> to choose between just the laptop, just the
projector or both.

On my laptop (a Dell running FC4) with 1920x1200 resolution I've had no
luck at all getting a couple of projectors to show my screen.  All these
projectors were capable of sizes up to 1600x1200, but even running my
laptop at these screen sizes didn't work.

The problem didn't seem to be the resolution, but rather the output to
the plug at the back of the laptop.  By this I mean that even running my
screen at 1024x768 the bottom and sides were chopped off, pretty much
the same thing that happened at 1920x1200.

This would be great to have addressed as I would love to be able to just
plug in my laptop and go.  Getting something on the screen wasn't a
problem, just getting it to display (enough of) my desktop.


Rodd

-- 
"It's a fine line between denial and faith.
 It's much better on my side"