Arch Linux

vis

Member

From: Switzerland

Registered: 2007-02-25

Posts: 81

T42 and xorg unexplained

This may not really an Arch issue, but I guess there are people here who know what's going on.

Around last August to November my IBM ThinkPad T42 did not work well with a beamer. To get a picture on the beamer the notebook has to be booted with the beamer plugged-in. Only if the kernel messages are displayed, I should start X server. Key combination Fn-F7 has no effect whatsoever. But I always got both the screen and the beamer going at the same time.

The ugly thing was, I had no control over the resolution: it could vary between 640x480 to 1280x1024 depending on the beamer although my screen was fixed 1024x768! Interestingly the LCD followed this resolution (640x480 was full-screen). The higher resolution projection was not clear. Even the 1024x768 was not very sharp.

After an update a couple of days ago, the situation is *much* better. I haven't tested enough (there are about 5 beamers involved) but so far I alway got 1024x768. Fn-F7 works on the console, if I'm not mistaken, it also worked even on X.

Can somebody explain to me what is going on?