Matrox G550 in Feisty

[Liam Proven]

On 22/06/07, Thomas Findlay <tom at gm4doz.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi there ...
>
> I'm no Linux expert and I've just installed Feisty on a PC I built with a
> Matrox G550 twin-head graphics adapter in it.  I find that post
> installation, I can only get a maximum screen resolution of 800x600.  I
> looked around the net and the forums for a simple answer but I'm not
> understanding much of what I'm seeing , so not making much headway.  Can
> anyone here please point me to a 'simplified' one-stop-shop where I can find
> a solution to this?

My G550 is retired now - the PC it was in was replaced a few months
ago with an Athlon XP 2800+ with some nVidia thing from a few years
back in it. This does dual-head easier and better than the Matrox ever
did and so I've not bothered trying to get my old card going.

But I did use the G550 in dual-head mode under Ubuntu. It took a fair
bit of doing, with pointers from this very list. One chap even IMed me
to talk me through it. I can probably find the instructions from back
then somewhere if you want, but in brief:

[1] You need to download and install Matrox' binary driver from matrox.com
[2] You then need to edit the X.org config file to tell it that you
have 2 screens, what res they run at, what their positions are
relative to one another and so on
[3] You will probably need to edit the file, relaunch X, quit it with
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, edit the file some more and repeat quite a few
times. To do this, I did

killall gdm

... to stop the Gnome Display Manager from constantly trying to
restart X, did the editing at the console and used

startx

... to test it.

It's doable, but an nVidia will make life /much/ easier and give you
hardware 3D to boot. This means very pretty screensavers, if nothing
else. Note that Compiz/Beryl will work on a dual-head system, but you
can't drag from one window to another, so it is effectively broken.

-- 
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