On Sun, Oct 29, 2006 at 11:44:41AM +0100, Jonathan Thornburg wrote: > The main thing I've found which doesn't work at all well is sending video > to the external video connector to drive a projector for conference > presentations. The usual tricks like changing the X resolution (with > 'xrandr') and toggling Fn-F7 have no effect whatsoever -- so far as I can > tell there's no signal at all going to the external video connector. The > only way I have found to make this work is to reboot, enter the IBM BIOS > setup, and set the 'boot video device' to 'LCD + VGA' (instead of the > default 'Thinkpad LCD'). The machine then boots normally (with the console > display), but when I start X the builtin display is blank and 1280x1024 > video is sent to the external connector. My usual 'xterm -fn 7x14 -fg > white -bg black' is really ugly in this video mode, but 'xpdf -fullscreen' > looks fine.
On a T43 I also have to have output set to LCD+VGA, and to reboot with a connector in the VGA port if I want video out to actually work; annoying but not unbearable. The thing that I have not yet conquered is the almost total randomness as to what resolution X will use. On a handful of data projectors, I've got the correct 1024x768; on most I get 640x480; and I get occasional oddities like "clipped" 1024x768 (missing 20-30 pixels on all edges). Nothing I've tried thus far has persuaded X to use a sensible resolution in such cases. My guess would be that the T43p - which I believe uses a completely different video card to the T43 - may be immune to such problems. Laurie -- http://tratt.net/laurie/ -- Personal http://convergepl.org/ -- The Converge programming language http://sosym.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/ -- Software and Systems Modelling Team
