enabling RGB output

[Freddie Cash]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Pierre Abbat <phma at 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 Cashfjwcash at gmail.com