[ltp] T61 and xrandr

[Micha Feigin]

Personally I use the propriatry nvidia driver (for various reasons not relevant
here nouveau is less than useless to me)

To connect the machine to projectors I use nvidia-settings. Under x server
display configuration (second entry) you can detect and set screen however you
want.

Another options is to export to PDF from OOo which should display just fine
(won't give you animations, but if you don't use that distracting and useless
presentation feature you are ok).

On Fri, 5 Nov 2010 13:42:13 -0700
John Jason Jordan <johnxj@comcast.net> wrote:

> I will soon need to give a presentation in a local university
> classroom. The university calls the classroom "high level tech," which
> means that it has a computer, projector, and miscellaneous other
> equipment. Unfortunately, the computer runs only Windows and does not
> have OOo installed, or any of the fonts or other software I need for my
> presentation. The machine is blocked in the BIOS from booting from a
> live CD or thumb drive. I really must get my Thinkpad T61 working with
> the projector. Oh, and my Thinkpad has nVidia graphics and is using the
> nouveau driver on Fedora 13, x86_64.
> 
> Last night I was in the room for someone else's presentation, and I
> brought my Thinkpad with me. I connected the university's cable to the
> video output, but got nothing on the screen. It was as if the cable was
> not connected. 
> 
> Then I googled a bit and discovered xrandr. I installed it, and then
> tried the cable again. After typing "xrandr" in the command line the
> projector finally displayed my computer on the screen. However,
> apparently it gave me a virtual screen, because the projector was
> showing a blank screen (my background is just a solid light color
> because I hate junk on my screen).
> 
> After a bit of fiddling I discovered that if I dragged a program window
> off my screen to the right it suddenly appeared on the classroom
> screen. In other words, xrandr had created a wider screen for me. While
> that is lovely, when I try to do a slide show with Impress it all
> appears on the main screen, not off to the right.
> 
> I'm trying to figure out how to get my main screen to project. Note
> that I am an idiot and have no idea how all this stuff works. Are there
> settings in xrandr to fix which side projects? Or are there better
> tools to use than xrandr? What if I used the proprietary nVidia driver?
> Has anyone done this successfully with a T61 with nVidia graphics?