Manually Configuring Dual Monitors?

English Hardware
#1

I am running openSUSE 11.1 on an MSI Wind netbook (with Intel 945 graphics). I have been trying to get dual monitors working with this machine. I have a Dell 2001FP (1600x1200) that I want to use with the Wind. I first tried enabling dual head mode with SaX. however, even though I had chosen Xinerama, it only would appear in cloned mode. Also, it would display in 1024x768 on the external monitor, forcing the Wind’s display to extend lower than the physical screen.

I disabled the dual head options in SaX and added the following lines to my xorg.conf:

Section "Screen"
...

        SubSection      "Display"
            Virtual     2724 1800
        EndSubSection
EndSection

The virtual setting is the resolution of both monitors combined. I got this from a friend with the same machine (running Kubuntu).

This didn’t work either. The cloned display was still used, and the same resolution conflicts remained.

Then I tried enabling the dual-head/xinerama with SaX again, and then looked at the xorg.conf. I noticed that there were two xinerama lines, one that was on, the other was off. I commented out the latter, and restarted the X server. This time the cloned mode was off, but the resolution on the external monitor was still 1024x768.

At this point I think my only chance is to manually configure the dual monitors (as two screen sections) myself. While i’ve done plenty of editing xorg.conf, I’ver never gone this far. Does anyone know how I should start?

#2

I think you will almost certainly have to do this by hand. The intel video chipsets and sax2 limitations seem to cause grief for many trying to successfully set up the X-server for dual monitor configuration.

I did find this thread which may offer a solution for you. Check out post #7 by reveil. This person managed to set up a virtual desktop with 2 monitors. It should be reasonably easy to configure the desktop to span your monitors horizontally if preferred.

#3

Thanks for the link; will definitely check this out!

#4

I checked your hint out but unfortunately, it doesn’t work for my setup with nvidia 7600 GT and two displays, one DVI 1280x1024 and one VGA 1024x768. I took the mentioned xorg.conf out of posting 7, edited it so that it should work with an nvidia card and different monitors, but it doesn’t work correctly.
What fails is that the second monitor, the DVI connected, does not get recognized at all. Only the first one, VGA connected does get recognized and it then has a virtual view with scrolling of the described virtual size of 2304x1024.

What I use so far is a hand edited configuration with xinerama, which works fine. But I am not lucky with it as I always get the randr missing on display :0 error message.

Someone has a working xorg.conf with randr-based dual-head setup for nvidia cards?

#5

I digged a bit around and read that nvidia isn’t actually supporting the randr 1.2 extensions. They seem to be working on this but it isn’t actually released so far. Ongoing news can be found here:
nvnews thread