On Sun, Dec 6, 2009 at 7:29 PM, Victor Soich <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > Anyone who has gone through this "hassle" of trying to get 3 monitors > to work in ubuntu linux, please steer me clear of "bumps in the road". >
Well, the newer video cards can behave differently in Linux than the ones that I've used, so YMMG. I'll give you my experience. I used three videos the last time I was fully operational with five monitors. They were all 17" CRTs from the second hand store -- I'm not really a big spender. :) I had an nVidia 5200, 7200, and 7800, all with CRT+DVI out. Originally, I had some serious problems with the two 7 series cards, but they seem to have corrected the problem in the later driver releases. Moreover, the latest driver releases won't support all three, so I had to step back a few to get full coverage. The documentation that comes with the nVidia driver package (also available online) is VERY good. For the most part, you just follow it and the pattern already set forth in a stock xorg.conf. The problems I remember are that the results from lspci are in hex notation and xorg.conf expects decimal notation for the PCI bus addresses (or maybe it's the other way around). A=10, B=11, etc. The nVidia documentation will tell you how to specify what output on the card you want to use. Lots of trial and error. I highly recommend you either don't use a window manager or use a very simple one (like twm) for testing. In terms of behavior, new video cards (both ATI and nVidia) have special driver options that allow you to treat two cards as one (like mega TwinView). It allows you to use accelerated applications across all displays. I don't know anything about that, though -- I can't afford those cards. Otherwise, there are basically two modes, Xinerama and normal. In Xinerama mode, the window manager understands all the monitors to be one big desktop, but video acceleration generally doesn't work. In normal mode, each screen (TwinView laws apply) is seen as a single X Screen (word choice?) and can't leave it. If I remember right, you can get full video acceleration on each screen without tweaking. Xinerama and normal modes both allow the mouse to travel across all the screens freely, but keyboard focus will follow the mouse from screen to screen in normal mode. I personally like normal mode, but it takes some getting used to. There are some problems with Xinerama which modern window managers are supposed to address, but don't seem to. For example, the maximize function is only supposed to increase a window to the size of the screen, not the entire desktop space. Some window managers, like fluxbox, like individual screens and their configuration files allow screen specific configuration. I like and use fluxbox. If there's something I didn't address, just ask and I'll do my best. Good luck! -- Andrew Jackman [email protected] CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail message, including any attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure, or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message. All your base are belong to us. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
