boblq wrote: > BTW, Tracy was exploring dual monitor systems a while back. > How about a report. Feel free to change the Subject line :)
I have been using dual monitor systems for a few years now. I first got started with it back at MP3.com. Then I would take two PCI graphics cards (I forget what kind) and plug them both into the PCI bus and plug two monitors in. FreeX86's Xinerama support drove both of them quite well. But then I went to a dual-head nvidia card for a while. So now I had just one video card but it has two vga or dvi outputs on it. That worked pretty well also and even did 3d acceleration but you had to use nvidia's proprietary driver. This proprietary driver thing is a huge PITA. Every time Fedora updated my kernel I had to recall the magic incantation to get the new driver installed. If I recompiled my own kernel or did anything out of the ordinary kernel-wise I was in trouble. A few months ago I started running Xen. Nvidia's driver at the moment simply will not work with Xen. I suspect they will fix this when FC5 comes out with Xen built in standard. Due to all of the headaches in dealing with the driver over the previous couple of years and the fact that I don't play games or need 3d acceleration anyhow I dumped the nvidia card and got a Matrox dual-head card. It works perfectly, even under Xen and with custom compiled kernels since Xorg supports it natively. I usually have email on the far left, browser on the far right, and have a dozen xterms in between them. Since I got the dual monitor setup and have an effective screen size of 3200x1200 pixels I notice I rarely use the virtual desktops anymore since most of what I need can be on the screen at the same time. Having everything you need on screen at the same time is a nice efficiency boost. -- Tracy R Reed http://copilotconsulting.com 1-877-MY-COPILOT -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
