Duplicate / change laptop screen to HDMI output

[saundeg01]

Hello forum!

I have got myself a very nice debian build of retropie and emulationstation running on an i7 Latitude E7470 laptop. My final step is to push the output to a TV rather than the laptop screen and at this point I'm struggling.

When I plug the hdmi in, the display gets extended and I'm trying to find a way of either duplicating the output or pushing it solely to the TV.

I have been trying to use xrandr as per this article https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/371793/how-to-duplicate-desktop-in-linux-with-xrandr but get a return of "can't open display" when I run xrandr --current.

Can anyone steer me in the right direction?

Thanks!

[mitu]

@saundeg01 said in Duplicate / change laptop screen to HDMI output:

"can't open display" when I run xrandr --current.

Are you running xrandr from a terminal in the desktop env or from a console/text terminal ? It needs to be run from a desktop session.

[saundeg01]

@mitu - Thank you! I wasn't. I am now and the xrandr commands have worked.