So today in my operating systems class we were covering Linux. Using the included knoppix liveCD that came with the book, the professor was trying to demonstrate what interesting things can be done with linux.

Problems arose, however, because with the Knoppix CD, the image displayed on the projector was split vertically, some portions cut off, and a nasty dark image.

Since I'd left my book at home, and had a case of liveCDs sitting in my truck by accident, I was able to provide a somewhat solution by using BackTrack4 which did not mangle the image as the knoppix CD did.

Now, in this environment, I didn't have the opportunity to mess around with it like I would have wanted to, but nevertheless, I am still very curious as to what exactly may have been the issue.

Is anyone here familiar with Linux and projectors used by misguided community colleges who spend tons of money on hardware, parking lots, gyms, etc and almost nothing on anything else?

They should not be any different than computer monitors. It is best to state their minimum and maximum specs for vertical and horizontal spec. Probably the modeline that the Knoppix scripts tried to use was not completely with in spec. You can set these setting before loading up Knoppix at the boot screen. Another reason why you see a split screen is the cable to the projector is too long to handle high resolutions. IMHO, Knoppix has lost it self, so its scripts are old. Sabayon Linux is a better as LIVE Linux distribution to show off what Linux can do.

That's kind of what I suspected, too, however changing the resolution through knoppix's display configuration wouldn't solidify the changes, which, in effect, did absolutely nothing except restart the xserver.