With Intel open sourcing their drivers and showing they are supporters of Linux, it surprises me that there isn't a GUI app out there for editing the Intel 950 Graphics chipset (to enable clone and span external monitors on laptops).

Is this truly the case ? One needs to edit X and restart X when they want to use a projector or external monitor ?

This will be quiet embarrassing when trying to demonstrate the advancement in the Linux world.

is this really the case? i am about to buy a laptop to run ubuntu on and was thinking about the Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950, but want to be able to use it for presentation without having to restart X... that would be embarrassing to take out my linux notebook and have to go through that in front lots of people...

The only way I get around this is having X setup to have VGA out all the time. So just plug in the projector/monitor VGA cable and your away.

The problem I have is I have a wide screen and thus miss the left hand part of the screen on projector/monitor [about 15%]. I have tried:

- changing my desktop to 1024x768 and then restart X [even turned off 915resolution]
- changing the projector to 16:9 aspect
- reading up on and setting all kind of Xorg.conf settings.
- tried liveCD's
- many other things I cant think of.

I have spent hours and hours and hours on this and nothing I can do will get this working.

The only way to see the whole display on external display is to boot up with the VGA plugged in. But then you lose your local LCD display and cant get it back without restarting the system.

I think Nvidia would be much better to get, in hind sight now.