[ltp] X60s: Projector Issues (again!)

[Atul Chitnis]

I specifically bought a Thinkpad X60s because, among other things, it 
natively uses a 1024x768 resolution - the resolution native to most data 
projectors these days.

>From that perspective, I have had no problems. It is a relief not having 
to reconfigure the machine every time to downgrade the resolution to match 
a projector, or fiddle with stuff to get videos and other things going - 
issues I had with my previous T30.

But yesterday, I ran into an unexpected issue when I was giving a talk at 
(of all the places in the world) Microsoft.

I started off the way you'd expect - I had my notebook booted and ready 
with the presentation, and as soon as I was introduced, walked up to the 
stage, plugged the projector into the VGA port, hit Fn-F7 (as I have for 
the past decade)... and spend the next 7 minutes having to deal with 
comments about Linux not being ready for the desktop, as I struggled to 
get the display out on the big screen, which the notebook refused to do.

I tried the usual trick - drop out of graphical mode, going to run-level 
3, then restarting X. No go. I tried init 1 and back to 3 (or 5), still no 
go. Nothing I did could induce the notebook to talk to projector via the 
VGA port.

Finally, much to my embarrassment, I reached for the last resort - I cold 
booted. This certainly fixed the issue - the display came up on the 
projector. But only on the projector - no display on my LCD (which meant 
that I couldn't see my slides without turning around), and I was not even 
able to hit Fn-F7 to switch *only* to LCD for a quick, off-projector edit.

My question:

How do I get the Thinkpad X60s to talk to the VGA port if the projector 
was not attached during coldboot time? And how do I get X to display on 
both the LCD and the projector/VGA port simultaneously, and get Fn-F7 to 
work as advertised (which it certainly does under Windows)?

My config is

Fedora Core 5
X Window System Version 7.0.0 (x.org)
Thinkpad X60s
2 GB RAM, 100 GB HDD
Intel Corporation Mobile Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

TIA!

Atul

-- 
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