I am currently trying to switch over from Vista to OpenSuse, although I’m running in to a problem with getting dual monitors to work using extended desktop. I have a Dell D630 laptop with Intel GM965 Express graphics, a laptop screen with a resolution of 1280x800, and an external Dell monitor with a resolution of 1280x1024 that sits to the right of my laptop. My external screen will clone my laptop screen, but I am trying to achieve an extended desktop. Something else I noticed is that the screen colors are only 24 bit, and I believe it should be 32. I have tried to manipulate the monitor settings but no matter what I select, all it does is mirror my laptop screen. Do I have to load different drivers then those that OpenSuse 11 loads by default? Can anyone tell me the commands I have to run in order to achieve the best resolution and an extended desktop?
Any am very new to Linux, and I am desparate to switch over and use Suse as my primary OS. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I ran across your post yesterday after googleing more or less your same question. Since this post shows up so high on google’s results I thought it would be good to answer how I solved your question (it’s been over a month so I don’t know if you need this anymore, but I’m sure others will read this).
Scott (the author of my link) and I both have ATI cards, but as far as I can tell this shouldn’t matter. I did not need to add the line in my xorg.conf file to use ATI drivers.
For any other ATI users reading this post, both Scott and I were unsuccessful with Novell’s maintained article ‘ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset and OpenSUSE 11’.
This works like a charm for me, everything else I’ve looked at was less fruitful. Hope this works for you.
I forgot to mention, if your monitor goes back to cloning after a reboot (I presume it will) you should add the command that extended your desktop to your .profile. For example, I added:
This is run when you login. This means your boot options will still show up on cloned screens (it’s not like you need two monitors to boot though). If this bothers you, you can find some other startup script to but it in.