[nflug] Multiple Monitors

joshj at linuxmail.org joshj at linuxmail.org
Wed Mar 29 17:53:06 EST 2006


Thus spake Cyber Source on Wed, 29 Mar 2006

> <When I try to use it (Option "Xinerama" "true") everything
> appears to go off ok, but my desktops are just mirrored. The mouse and
> windows move the same in each (not from one to the next) as if I had
> done no monitor configuration at all.
>
> Is Xinerama what I want to do? I'm not really sure. I need someone to
> say "Yes Josh, you need Xinerama working" or "No Josh, you are barking
> up the wrong tree, look into flibbityflabbityfloo">
>
> I believe Xinerama is pretty depreciated though I could be wrong, I remember 
> it was needed for some stuff but I have never seen the need. Probably because 
> I always work with NVIDIA stuff and with NVIDIA, TwinView does all that I 
> need. Options within TwinView can be "Clone", "RightOf", "LeftOf", etc.. 
> These refer to how the second monitor is handled, being self explanatory. 
> Xinerama may have options like that and they are probably specific to your 
> driver for your video card. I won't go into detail about the NVIDIA TwinView 
> because you have an ATI card. The fact you have such stuff working with ATI 
> is pretty good to begin with ;). Check the docs on your driver to see what 
> the options are for dual outputs or you could save alot of grief by just 
> getting an NVIDIA card, you can pick them up cheap enough and you'll love the 
> performance too. I'm kinda biased to NVIDIA (can't ya tell?), I like their 
> support for Linux, all inclusive drivers, and for about $25 you can have some 
> amazing video.

So, you like nvidia huh? I have experience with one each of voodoo5,
nvidia, and ati cards and thus far I've been happiest with my radeon.
I've never had good luck with binary drivers of any kind. I used the
radeon which is part of the kernel and it worked perfectly the first
time. I can play dvd's on my p3. Which I could never do before. But if
my next card is an nvidia then I know where to come for support.

Xinerama. I looked into a bit and it seems that xinerama is a generic,
device-neutral way to share screens. It will allow you to use 2
different video cards on 2 different screens which could even have 2
different resolutions. Downside is that you get no Direct Rendering.
With MergedFB I do but the resolutions have to be the same. I was kind
of hoping that if I added a 3rd screen, say, above my left screen then I
could drag stuff *up* to it. But it doesn't seem that there is any way
to do that except to maybe have a separate Xsession running on each
screen. But I can't spare the CPU cycles. I'm using this for audio
recording, so I can't have any interupts from window-drawing or
desktop-switching.

So I'll keep running with mergedfb and a stretched desktop and just move
my task bar and everything to the left screen.

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