Here's a quick entry that will bore all of you who tend to skip my open source/nerdy computer posts. All the same, I hope it will be of use to some out there on the interweb.
A while ago, I gave a brief review of my new ASUS Eee PC 901 and Ubuntu-eee 8.04.1. Overall, it was a very favorable review, but one of my big niggles with Ubuntu-eee was that it did not support the VGA-out on my Eee PC. Now, I use my Eee to project slides for church, so this was a major set-back, and I was always having to reboot into the native Xandros OS just for this functionality. Until last week, that is.
As it turns out, I was wrong about Ubuntu-eee not supporting the VGA-out on my Eee PC 901. Actually, it does. It just doesn't display that functionality up-front, in a nice, easy to access GUI. This is one thing the Xandros OS did a fantastic job with. You could actually just press two buttons on the Eee to (1) change the resolution and (2) enable the VGA-out.
But, as I've already alluded to, it turns out it is quite possible (and actually quite simple) to get the VGA-out going with Ubuntu-eee 8.04.1. And here's how:
We're going to use a fantastic program that comes with Ubuntu-eee called "xrandr". This program will let us set the resolutions of the internal monitor, the external monitor, and turn the external monitor (VGA-out) on all with one, easy command. The command that I use when I hook my Eee up to our church's projector is:
xrandr --output LVDS --mode 800x600 --output VGA --mode 800x600 --same-as LVDS
Basically, this command first sets the internal monitor (LVDS) to a resolution of 800x600, and then it turns on the VGA-out port (VGA) and sets it to the same resolution of 800x600, and then it sets it so that the VGA-out will mirror the internal display.
I use a resolution of 800x600 because I want the screens to mirror each other, and this is the largest "standard" resolution that will fit on the internal Eee screen (because it's max resolution is 1024x600). Now, you can use xrandr to create one large virtual screen such that the external screen is a different resolution from the internal one. But, unfortunately, Ubuntu's netbook remix interface doesn't play nice with that type of setup. So, for now, I'm happy with mirroring the two displays.
Now, what happens when you want to unplug the VGA-out and set the internal monitor back to the native resolution? Well, you just use another simple xrandr command:
xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output VGA --off
As you can probably guess, this command first sets the internal monitor to the "auto" resolution (which is the native resolution of the internal screen), and then turns off the VGA-out display.
Now, to make it even easier to set up my Eee with a projector, I simply wrote these two commands into their own files, and created icons on the top panel--one that points to the command that turns the external monitor on, and one that points to the command to turn it off. Easy peazy!
