[ale] Basic Laptop for presentations question

scott mcbrien smcbrien at gmail.com
Mon Apr 13 17:14:20 EDT 2009


On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Michael H. Warfield <mhw at wittsend.com>wrote:

> On Mon, 2009-04-13 at 16:08 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> > I've got it hooked to a projector now and it did auto-detect on boot.
>
> > Function-F8 seems to have no effect.
>
>         To get Function-F8 to work you'll probably need a laptop brand
> specific
> module that intercepts those special codes.  You haven't mentioned what
> kind of laptop.  If you don't need it, I wouldn't worry about it.
>
> > I'm still curious how to get Impress to realize I have 2 monitors.  I
> > assume it can have presenter notes on the laptop screen and just the
> > slides on the projector.
> >
> > Under slide show settings, there is a pull down for multiple monitors,
> > but it is grayed out, even though I have it hooked to the projector.
> >
> > Greg
> >
> > On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Charles Shapiro
> > <hooterpincher at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Have you tried it? On my R50, that's part of the BIOS. It works fine
> under
> > > an old copy of Ubuntu, and I'd expect it to work regardless of what OS
> the
> > > machine is running.
> > >
> > > -- CHS
> > >
> > > On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Greg Freemyer <
> greg.freemyer at gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > >>
> > >> All,
> > >>
> > >> I've never done a demo via linux before.
> > >>
> > >> I have my laptop dual booting and from windows I can just function F8
> > >> (I think) and the display gets duplicated to the external VGA
> > >> connector.
> > >>
> > >> How do I do that for Linux?  (KDE4 if it matters)
> > >>
> > >> Thanks
> > >> --
> > >> Greg Freemyer
>
> Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 |  mhw at WittsEnd.com
>

I do a lot of presentations, I've worked on Toshiba, IBM, and Dell laptops.
 In my experience, the Fn+<key> commands work on some, but not others, and
generally you need to turn on the external VGA or DVI port in the BIOS.

I had an IBM T40 that worked great, Fn+8 worked without problems.  Now I've
got a T60 that the external VGA port will turn on if the projector or other
display is connected at boot, but will not turn on if the machine was booted
prior to connecting the outside source.  Plus as an added bonus, the Fn+8
doesn't work.  On the positive, this seems to be the behavior the operating
system who shall not be named, which leads me to believe it's a Lenovo BIOS
thing.

I've seen similar behavior from some of the Dell laptops I've worked with.
 The toshibas were old, but they seemed to work just fine.

-Scott
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20090413/0508d701/attachment-0001.html 


More information about the Ale mailing list