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jwhendy

Member

Registered: 2010-04-01

Posts: 621

Duplicate displays and allow fullscreening a presentation

Greetings,

I'm having a hard time capturing what's going on. I'm trying to duplicate my display so I can present a PDF presentation followed by a live demo. For the life of me, I can't get the presentation to duplicate based on the dimensions of the VGA projector; instead, it fullscreens as expected on my laptop while being zoomed in to the top left of the file on the VGA display. I've been googling around quite a bit with no luck. It seems most folks are looking to extend with the external being primary, which I can do. The issue is seeing the same thing on both screens. I've tried with this:

$ xrandr --output VGA1 --auto --primary --output eDP1 --auto

I've also tried turning eDP1 off, then back on with the above to see if that would "trick" xrandr into treating VGA1 as primary. Here's my xrandr output:

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 32767 x 32767
eDP1 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm panning 1920x1080+0+0
   1920x1080     60.01*+  40.00  
   1400x1050     59.98  
   1600x900      60.00  
   1280x1024     60.02  
   1280x960      60.00  
   1368x768      60.00  
   1280x720      60.00  
   1024x768      60.00  
   1024x576      60.00  
   960x540       60.00  
   800x600       60.32    56.25  
   864x486       60.00  
   640x480       59.94  
   720x405       60.00  
   640x360       60.00  
VGA1 connected primary 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm
   1024x768      60.00* 
   800x600       60.32    56.25  
   848x480       60.00  
   640x480       59.94  
VIRTUAL1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

I tried using this with no luck, as well as setting both monitors using mode 1024x768, which also didn't work. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

jwhendy

Member

Registered: 2010-04-01

Posts: 621

Re: Duplicate displays and allow fullscreening a presentation

After messing around a bit, I think I've more or less solved this, at least to my satisfaction.

$ xrandr --output eDP1 --fb 1024x768 --mode 1024x768 --output VGA1 --mode 1024x768

I think it came down to shrinking the apparent physical size of the display using the --fb option. Things I'm still not thrilled about:
- my laptop screen is letterboxed on the sides with black
- the external display looks slightly stretched width-wise

Windows doesn't do this when you duplicate displays. Both show at their full resolution in a non-distorted manner. Any suggestions for tweaking the above to accomplish this? This would mean I see my laptop at 1920x1080, no borders, and the external display at 1024x768, no borders and no distortion.