I have an old Toshiba Tecra 8100 that I run CentOS on - it's running 5.3 although not completely up to date at the moment.

About a year ago, a club I help administer bought a BenQ DLP so we could show movies and do other projector things more easily than lugging around a 27" TV set. It worked just fine, but the behavior of the system with it has changed over the year and I'm curious if anyone might know why.

When I first connected the DLP, the laptop (and CentOS) recognized it immediately, and there was absolutely no trouble with it at all. I plugged it in, turned it on, hooked it up, and voila, it worked.

Now the laptop doesn't recognize the DLP unless I plug it in either before booting, or reboot after it's plugged in, and I can't play with the <function>-F5 combination (that switches between LCD, DLP, LCD+DLP, no video) until I'm logged in unless I want to be stuck in whichever mode it lands in. I usually set it for both and wait until my login is complete, then I can flip between all the settings just fine.

One of the things I really liked about CentOS with this DLP at first was that I did NOT need to reboot for the system to recognize and use the DLP, just like any other hot-plug add-on. I connect it via the external 15-pin video port, same as day 1.

Am I missing something, like "be sure the projector is on (or off) when I connect it to the laptop? I think I've tried all possible combinations of this and it just doesn't function at all unless I (re)boot after the DLP is on and connected.

The only change I know for certain that happened over this year is that I upgraded from 5.2 to 5.3, but I can't remember if this had anything to do with the change in behavior or not (I don't think so, but it's been over the course of a year...).

Thanks.

mhr