Setting up a second monitor

[Daniel Carrera]

Antony Gelberg wrote:
> You need xinerama.  This should help for starters. 
> http://www.paralipsis.org/2006/01/enabling-xinerama-in-ubuntu/

Hmmm... looks coplicated. I'll try to help here and ask intelligent 
questions...

Step 1:
-------
Quote: "First, assuming you have managed to install the video boards and 
connect the displays to them"

By "video boards" does it mean video cards? Is that the usual way to 
have two monitors? To use two video cards? Or is there some sort of 
splitter?

Jean, what setup do you have? two video cards?

Step 2:
-------
Quote: "one needs to run the program lspci."

The output of the 'lspci' command is not very user friendly. You can 
improve this a little by running this modified command:

lspci | grep VGA


Explanation:
1. lspci prints information about everything on the PCI bus (video 
cards, USB ports, etc).
2. 'grep VGA' extracts the lines that contain the text VGA.
3. The | is a "pipe". It means, "take the output from lspci and give it 
to grep".

Could you run that command and post the output here?

The next step is to configure the X config file:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Configuring X is not for the faint of heart. If you wish, I can try to 
configure it for you (though I've never configured X to use two 
monitors). Either way, make a backup of your xorg.conf file:

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf ~/xorg.conf.backup

> NB The man command works for many config files as well as programs. 
> Hence you may wish to peruse man xorg.conf.

Ubuntu doesn't have a man page for xorg.conf. And if it did, I don't 
think I'd recommend it to a new user. Man pages are not really intended 
for that.

Cheers,
Daniel.
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