Using Linux for presentations...any experience?

[Andrew S. Townley]

I have just returned from a trip where I had to do a bit of a
presentation on my 770X running RH5.1.  I had used it several times
before for presentations when it was running NT before I installed Linux
without any trouble.  My experience this time with using the TP for the
presentation was not exactly what I would call positive.  Eventually, I
got it to kinda work, but I was wondering if anyone else on the list had
some knowledge, tricks or tips for successfully doing presentations on
external projectors under Linux.

Here's what happened to me:

The first thing that happened was that when I plugged in the projector
(linux was already running and into X), the display freaked. 
Eventually, the machine became totally unresponsive and I actually had
to kill it using the reset button.  None of the graceful or more severe
shutdown procedures worked, with or without the projector plugged into
the VGA port on the back.

Learning from the first experience, when I started the machine next
time, I plugged in the projector before booting.  That helped, but I did
have to type while looking over my shoulder since the LCD was blank. 
Also, the fsck'ing of the disk took a little while :).  Now, I know that
the TP utilities include display management controls and I suspect that
things would've have gone much smoother if I had some sort of
equivalent.  I know this subject has come up before, but I did attempt
to send mail to Joe Sharp about how to make it work, but never heard
anything.  As far as I know, no response on the subject was forwarded to
the list as requested by Daniel Steiner either.

Fortunately, I was using an InFocus projector instead of a fixed
resolution LCD panel.  I don't even want to think about how much trouble
it would be to make that work correctly.

Mind you, I'm not really complaining, I'm just trying to figure out how
to make the presentation aspects of the TP work with the effectiveness
it did when running NT.  One of the reasons I purchased the machine in
the first place was so that I had a development machine that I could
show other people what was going on in the form of presentations, demos
or whatever was necessary.  I really don't want to have to flip between
NT and Linux just to accomplish this task since more and more of what
I'm doing can be done under Linux.  Also, I'm not looking for
presentation software or anything like that, just what it takes to set
up the system.

Thanks in advance for any assistance,

ast