Adding a second monitor

[Ric Moore]

On 06/24/2012 03:26 PM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 8:43 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 24 June 2012 16:33, Avi Greenbury <lists at avi.co> wrote:
>>> Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>>>> So, given that I have a large PCI-E slot and a regular PCI-X slot
>>>> empty, I'm wondering...
>>>> 1) Should I expect X to manage 2 cards, and if so what should I do
>>>> besides just plugging them in?
>>>
>>> In general, X is happy with two monitors on one card, and anything else
>>> is still considered esoteric. There are a few multi-card setups that
>>> are known to work, and several that don't.
>>>
>>> In general, you will need to co-operative cards and a non-free
>>> driver that works with both. I'm pretty sure that this works in NVidia
>>> with the right cards, their driver and their Twinview tool, but it does
>>> leave your setup's reliance very much in the hands of NVidia
>>
>> Sounds more or less right.
>>
>> In my experience, by rule of thumb rather than hard-and-fast absolutes:
>>
>> * a pair of 2 identical single-port cards is fairly likely to work
>>
>> * if cards need proprietary drivers, make sure both need the *same*
>> driver - e.g. 2 nVidias of the same generation, or 2 ATIs of the same
>> generation
>>
>> * a pair of 2 cards where the drivers are FOSS, good, modern & support
>> multihead has a fair chance
>>
>> * don't mix & match cards where one requires a proprietary drive & the
>> other doesn't
>>
>> * don't mix & match cards that need proprietary drivers - e.g. 1 × ATI
>> + 1 × nVidia
>>
>> * don't mix generations - e.g. random old weird thing + modern card is
>> not a good choice.
>>
>> * if you have motherboard graphics + an AGP slot, you can't combine
>> them; only 1 AGP device at a time is possible. AGP+PCI works, though
>>
>> --
>> Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
>
> Thanks.  Looking at the nvidia stuff on this card, and what you wrote,
> it seems I should be able to put 2 monitors on this one card.
> However, I can't seem to figure out how to configure this.
>
> nvidia-xconfig generates a config with a single monitor section,
> identical except for whitespace to what I have now.  Adding the
> --enable-all-gpus option produces an error message to the effect that
> it could not figure out how many gpus there were.  None of the other
> options seemed likely to help.
>
> I'm starting to wonder if a fresh install of 12.04 might figure this
> out for me.  I was going to wait for 12.04.1, but this might encourage
> me a bit.
>
>

Use "nvidia-settings". It should be on your program menu and in /usr/bin

THAT sets up dual monitors, as it's a little bit more complicated than 
some script can handle. You will have to configure the second monitor, 
agree that it is identified and set as expected, then select twinview if 
you're using one card/two monitors, position the respective monitors to 
their physical location ...which is right and which is left, the second 
monitor should come to life and if all appears correct, then you look 
down in the lower right corner to the "Save to X configuration file" 
button and save it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It should ask for your passwd 
to proceed. I highly doubt you will set it up any other way. This isn't 
hard, but I don't think that xconfig can make all these choices for you 
correctly, so it doesn't try. Been doing this long time, it works. :) Ric


-- 
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
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