Dual monitors ?

Belthezar · n00b Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 28 Location: Ohio, USA

I am still compiling KDE right now, but I have a Dell GX260 PC with the onboard video card along with an AGP card I put in. I am wondering if anyone out there has any experience with trying to run two X servers, one on each video card, and hooked up two monitors.

I am the technical support person at work, and this is my primary workstation, so I want to be able to have a monitor dedicated KDE with VMWare running a Win2k box for support purposes. At the same time I would like the freedom of using my other monitor for exploring Linux

If anyone has any advice on how to achieve this I would appreciate it! I did a forum search but couldn't come up with anything searching for "dual monitor", "dual xwindows" etc.

metalhedd · Posted: Tue Oct 29, 2002 9:12 pm Post subject:

I'm sure its possible to run 2 xservers. just set the display property for each one, but i think you can also run something called xinerama which does dual monitors on 1 server (Or something like that, I could be wrong)
so just go do a search for xinerama, it may be exactly what you're looking for

Belthezar · n00b Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 28 Location: Ohio, USA

Hmm, that Xinerama looks like exactly what I need! Thank you very much

Now the trick is to try and get my onboard video to stay active with an AGP card plugged in, or I gotta find another video card lying around somewhere. hehe

keenan · n00b Joined: 30 Oct 2002 Posts: 33

If your onboard video is AGP, it's not possible to use both. The AGP 'bus' only supports one device. See if you
can scrounge an old S3 PCI card or something

Belthezar · n00b Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 28 Location: Ohio, USA

I found an old ELSA Gloria XL graphics card, it's a BEAST of a card, takes the whole length of the case. LOL It was some super high end thing at one point, and now is probably beaten out by a Geforce2. hehe

But as of right now I am fired up with KDE on both monitors, so this is cool! I can't move back and forth between them yet but this was the first step to getting that other software loaded up. Thanks again for the help, this is fun stuff

Belthezar · n00b Joined: 03 Jun 2002 Posts: 28 Location: Ohio, USA

Yay it's working!!!

One thing i found out though is to turn off "display contents while moving" for window objects in KDE. I tried to drag a window from one monitor to the other with it on and hard locked X. DOH But with that turned off it's working just like it's supposed to!

The only thing now is I think I would have rather had 2 seperate KDE desktops on each monitor as opposed to the one really wide desktop I have right now. For instance the KDE panel goes all the way across both monitors which kind of sucks.

Anyone have any pointers to having each desktop be on the seperate monitors?

nempo · Posted: Wed Oct 30, 2002 6:02 pm Post subject:

<troll>
Gnome works like like a charm togheter with xinerama.
</troll>