[mdlug] Dual Head

[Michael Mol]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Garry Stahl <tesral at wowway.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have experience with dual head monitors?  Due to my recent
> eye problems I find myself with a wealth of large monitors, to wit two.
>  I think having a second monitor to read references off it would be
> dandy.  That would mean two different desktops, not a continuous one.
>  One monitor is a LCD 23" the other an LED 27"  One is not going to get
> seamless integration across that.  Both are 1920x1080.
>
> I will need a new video card as ny cuireent one is not dual monitor
> capable.  I am currently running openSUSE 11.4

I don't have any direct experience with multimon on openSUSE. However,
multimon on Linux generally works well, as long as all heads are
powered by video cards from the same manufacturer, using the same
driver. I've directly managed setups with up to five heads on Ubuntu,
and up to two on Gentoo. (I'd put more on the Gentoo setup, except at
various times I either haven't had the spare displays or the spare
room.)

If your motherboard has onboard ATI/AMD video, you should be able to
slap a second video ATI/AMD video card in and get things working
pretty easily using either ATI's utilities, or using randr.

If your motherboard has onboard nVidia, ditto, but you'll be using
nVidia's drivers and utilities. (nVidia's driver doesn't support
randr. nouveau might.)

If you've already got an ATI/AMD or nVidia card in your system, you
should be able to throw a second card of the same brand in, with
little to no difficulty. (As long as all the cards are recent enough,
at least; anything older than five or so years may have fallen out of
support)

Or, of course, you could get a replacement video card that has two
video ports. In that event, configuration is still the same as if you
had two cards, or if you combined your onboard and an additional card.
And, of course, your motherboard may be able to drive two displays at
once. (Most onboard video I've seen lately comes with three video
ports, two of which it can push at the same time. Typically, you have
VGA+{DVI|HDMI|DisplayPort}.

Finally, it's worth noting that adapters to get between VGA<->DVI,
HDMI<->{DVI,DisplayPort} and DVI<->DisplayPort are cheap, typically
only $5 or so.

How well this works for you is largely going to depend on whether you
use propriety drivers or open-source drivers, and whether you have to
use the manufacturer-supplied tool or a randr tool. On most
distributions, the dekstop environment has some kind of a 'display' or
'monitor'-managing control panel applet which is used to manage
drivers via randr. So if you use something like nVidia, you'll need to
use nVidia's tool, rather than the desktop environments'.

-- 
:wq