Dual monitor setup was working with default drivers but is not working right with NIVIDA drivers

English Hardware
1

Hi,
i have a problem using a dual monitor setup.
I just installed openSUSE 12.1 (fresh install) and having a NVIDIA GT430 grafics card.

At first i had no NVIDIA driver or the NVIDIA repository installed/added, so i used the default system configuration (KDE) tool to activate my second monitor. This worked great without problems.

Today i found out that a NVIDIA repository is available for openSUSE 12.1 so i added it and installed the NIVIDA drivers for my card. The initial result (after a restart) was that only the first monitor was recognized and the default system configuration tool was not giving options to configuring them anymore!

So i searched a bit and found out that i have to use the NVIDIA X tool to configure the monitors, which i did then and after having some trouble saving the configuration i finaly can see something on the second monitor again, i even can move my mouse over.
But i cannot, like before i had installed the new NIVIDA drivers, move program windows over there, just the mouse pointer!

So, what can i do to get the second monitor usable again?

2

From kde open a terminal and start nvidia-settings as root. There you can set your dual monitor desktop. - I suggest choosing tweenview instead on separate X screens if both monitors are connected to the same card. Then save to Xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 (that’s why you have to start nvidia-settings as root, else you won’t be able to save it, and the settings will apply to your current session only).

3

Do you read my post? All of the stuff you said was not a problem for me and done allready. But the real solution was switching from Seperate X to twinview.

4

Not really. These kind of problems are usually the same, the answer encompasses all, like my mention of tweenview that solved your problem.

Oh, and you’re welcome, by the way.

5

No offense, but i have another related problem. Twinview works good but has it disatvantages.
I have two monitors one is much smaler than the other and has a lower resolution too. The smaler one is used as secondary monitor, located in the right side of the main monitor.

This results in the following behavior:

  • the second monitor acts as a kind of window showing just the upper left space of the “second desktop” (the second desktop seems to have the same resulution than the first monitor). Which means i can move the mouse outside of the visible area!
    But when maximizing windows on the second screen they just fit the visual area, which is good.
    But it would be nice to solve this mouse pointer issue too.

One minor problem i have is related to the primary monitor setting. I selected the larger monitor on the left side as primary monitor. Every application window i start is opening on the second monitor! Which is definitely not what i wanted.