On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Pierre Abbat <p...@phma.optus.nu> wrote:
> Last Saturday I brought my laptop to church to show someone the DVD (it's > about Bible translation and two people had tried to play it on their > Windows > boxen without success - I'm going to ask them to try VLC). I put the laptop > on the table and he pulled a sound cable and a video cable and plugged them > into the laptop. The sound immediately came out of the room's speakers. He > then tried pressing function keys to get the video to come out, but nothing > happened. How can I tell the laptop to output to the video connector? > The simplest method is to plug in the external monitor while the laptop is off. Some laptop BIOSes will auto-configure the ports based on what's detected at startup. Some will enable/disable the external ports via a Fn (blue function key near the left Control key) key combo (usually Fn+F5), but that doesn't always work with X11. If X11 is configured correctly, and RandR 1.2 support shows as enabled in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, then you can use either the CLI xrandr tool or a GUI version like krandr (for KDE) to configure all the screens. However, this will only work if X detects the external port at startup, which usually requires the cable be plugged in before X starts. -- Freddie Cash fjwc...@gmail.com
