[ltp] T61 and xrandr

[John Jason Jordan]

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

>I will soon need to give a presentation in a local university
>classroom. 

Thanks to everyone who replied, and apologies for not responding
sooner. I was able to take my T61 with me and try it in the classroom
again only today. Between the previous attempt and this time I
installed the nVidia proprietary driver. It was in the rpmfusion
repository for my Fedora 13 x86_64, making it trivial to install.

Using the nVidia GUI configuration utility I was able to get the
projector to display my desktop, but only at 1024 x 768, even though I
think the projector is capable of 1280 x 1064 (not positive about
that last comment). 

Using "Twinview" in the nVidia settings utility I could see both the
projector screen and my Thinkpad screen, but it displayed only the upper
left 1024 x 768 of the Thinkpad monitor, which runs at 1680 x 1050.
Using "Separate X Screen" I got my full 1680 x 1050 on the projector
screen, but scrunched, and worse, all I could see was the projector
screen; the laptop monitor went to black.

Note that the presentation I am going to give is about desktop
publishing with Scribus on Linux. I need every pixel I can scrape up.

I was imposing on the computer help staff to gain access to the room
today, so I'll have to go back for further experimenting later.
Meantime, I'm going to go back to the nouveau driver and try to figure
out how to tell xrandr what I want. I've used the open source drivers
since I first bought this Thinkpad a couple years ago and never had the
slightest problem with them, so I'm just as happy going back to them. I
understand that xrandr does not work with the proprietary nVidia
drivers.

Now I'm off to Google and man pages to see if I can figure out how to
use xrandr. If anyone has any further suggestions, they would be most
welcome.