On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 19:27, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2004, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > Matrox in both cases?
>
> Yeah, same card in fact.
Help me out here ... if Matrox uses an nvidia chipset, right?
If that's not correct, then please consider this for general interest...
--
The voodoo you have to go through to get dual monitors to work is
somewhat extreme, though (amazingly) really well documented[*].
Jeff's comment about them and Xinerama reminded me that ***they
implemented their own Xinerama, IN the driver*** which means, against
all logic, you DON'T call `X +xinerama`. Makes it barf. They advise
against it...
The keyword for the driver option you're searching on is "TwinView"
In my case, I *didn't* configure two monitors nor two X servers.
I ended up with one screen 2048x768 (or whatever) big, but the Xinerama
magic (usually) works - notably GNOME 2.4 does everything right.
Xscreensaver needs to be bumped to 4.14, but it also does everything
right.
Check this out - there's stuff in here which you never would have
expected in a Device section. It's unclear how much the rest of the
xf86config file influences the config. I have two Monitor sections, but
the two Screen sections seem to be overridden (and ignored) by this...
perhaps only one Monitor gets read, and then... <shrug> it works this
week, don't touch.
Section "Device"
Identifier "GForceFX5200"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "PNY Technologies"
BoardName "FX5200PCI"
BusID "PCI:1:6:0"
Option "TwinView" "True"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "31.47-85.03"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "60-85"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024 ; 1172x864,1172x864
; 1024x768,1024x768 ; 800x600,800x600"
EndSection
I told you it was voodoo.
AfC
* As you know, I'm running Gentoo. Half the reason I do is so that the
OS doesn't give me hassle when I have the temerity to want to use a
vendor supplied driver even if it happens to be binary non-free.
In portage there are two packages, "nvidia-kernel" and "nvidia-glx"
(both using the same download file from Nvidia). One of them contains
this HUGE documentation file from nvidia with All The Answers (tm). I
can email it to you if you think it would help and can't find it.
I gather there are Debian friendly ways to get the vendor driver from
Nvidia. As I understand it the free reverse-engineer one is terrible -
it certainly makes a hash of the dual head thing.
--
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd
Australia: +61 2 9977 6866 North America: +1 646 472 5054
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/
--
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