[lug] Dual monitors on Linux??

[Harris, James]

I actually felt completely crazy one week and did this with two Matrox
Millennium II cards.  It's been a year (or, at least, I did it sometime
around a month after Xfree 4.0 came out.)

As dry and awful as it is to read, you really need to read through:
http://www.xfree86.org/4.1.0/XF86Config.5.html
It's a brain warp and may take 800 hours, a lot of cursing and some drugs,
but everything you need is in this happy little man page.

So, here's what I remember:
-Start with XFree86 4.0, it can be done with 3.3.x but, the Xinerama feature
is not available and it's three hundred times the syntax nightmare.
-Define two monitors in your XF86Config file, (i.e., monitor0 and monitor1
-- or unique names...)
-I believe you need to have each device (cards, monitors) defined, then you
hierarchically nest them to build definitions, which finally lead to the
ServerLayout section.  (But I could be/usually am wrong.)  :)
-Then you bind it all together with Xinerama (beware, the window manager
also has to support it. Or, at least, when I was doing it that was a
requirement.  At that time, Enlightenment was one of the only WM's that did
it.)

Here's a snippet that I pulled out of the documentation:

**start snip
Here is an example of a ServerLayout section for a dual headed configuration
with two mice: 

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier  "Layout 1"
    Screen      "MGA 1"
    Screen      "MGA 2" RightOf "MGA 1"
    InputDevice "Keyboard 1" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice "Mouse 1"    "CorePointer"
    InputDevice "Mouse 2"    "SendCoreEvents"
    Option      "BlankTime"  "5"
EndSection
**end snip

Also... Keep in mind that you really need to have identical cards to do it.
Wish I could provide more specific process.  When I finally got it working,
it worked very well, but it did take some serious time and I'm kind of sorry
I've forgotten how to do it.

GOOD LUCK!
-Jim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Shannon Johnston [mailto:nunar at nunar.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2001 12:42
> To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
> Subject: [lug] Dual monitors on Linux??
> 
> 
> Does anybody know if you can run 2 monitors on a linux 
> workstation? Has anybody done this?? I would love to have details.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Shannon Johnston
> nunar at nunar.com
> --------------------------------
> 
> Hiroshima '45 Chernobyl '86 Windows '95
> 
> --------------------------------
> 
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