Update regarding HDMI frustration

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Monday 16 January 2012 16:49:38 Fedora User wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:45:17 +0000
> Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I missed the earlier thread about this. Would something on the lines
> > of
> > 
> > xrandr --output LVDS1 --mode 1366x768 --output HDMI1 --mode 1920x1080
> > --right- of LVDS1
> 
> Probably not and I was trying to clone LVDS1.

How exactly do you define "clone" if two displays have different resolutions?

The --same-as option of xrandr does the cloning, but the two displays must 
have the same resolution. So the resolution is chosen to be the biggest 
possible one supported by *both* displays, which is probably 1024x768 in your 
case ("xrandr" will list all resolutions for each output, and I can bet that 
this is the biggest one that appears on both lists). That is what you'd get by 
running:

xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --output HDMI1 --auto --same-as LVDS1

You can also try to use the xrandr 1.3 options --scale (or more generally
--transform) to recast the native resolution of one display into the native 
resolution of the other, but these are not going to be loseless 
transformations. There is no way you can map 1366x768 onto 1920x1080 (or vice 
versa) without losing quality (one way or another).

> After considerable
> experimentation, my hypothesis is that KDE grabs the extension.

I didn't look into what exactly KDE does, but my impression was always that it 
just provides a GUI wrapper around xrandr, which is being called in the 
background to do the actual work. I also use KDE, and was always able to use 
xrandr from the command line with KDE complying quite happily.
 
> WiDi is Intel's wireless display. With an i5 or i7 (possibly some
> i3's), Windows 7 and about $50 in additional hardware, you can stream
> computer to HDTV wirelessly.

I've never had the opportunity to play around with wireless displays, but I 
remember reading somewhere (phoronix?) that Linux support for that technology 
is on the way, or just around the corner, or something... Just give it some 
more time, it will become possible under Linux as well. :-)

HTH, :-)
Marko