[ltp] T61 and xrandr

[John Jason Jordan]

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?