Getting a Data Projector to Work in Linux

Getting a data projector to work can be quite annoying. You are nervous, because you have a presentation and on top of the stress the projector might not work properly. In this post I talk about some of the issues involved and give some pointers about how to resolve them.

See this tutorial presentation on how to get data projectors to work.


Of course, it is really bad publicity if you don't get the data projector to work. Just today I was watching a guy with ubuntu trying to give a presentation and trying to help him get it work. Finally somebody brought a windows computer. I am using linux exclusively and usually I am enjoying it, but these two issues make me consider to have a double boot with linux and windows.

I just searched for troubleshooting the data projector issue. I found that for many people reconfiguring the X Server (running dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg or editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf) and restarting it works, although it failed for other people.

If you have a newer version of X, you might notice that your /etc/X11/xorg.conf has become much cleaner. This is because many modes are automatically recognized rather than configured. As part of the XRandR project) many external devices should be able to hotplug ideally making it unnecessary to change any configurations. Thanks to this post to point it out.