While I'm planning my new system the possibility of a dual display arises (at very little cost as far as I can see). Does Linux support dual displays and, if so, in what sort of way does it do it?
I going to go very 'main stream' by choosing an AMD Dual Core processor and Nvidia graphics unless there's a very good reason to choose anything else. (I might be persuaded to go 'all Intel' with a Core 2 Duo processor if there are good reasons for doing so though)
Hi Chris
On Wednesday 13 September 2006 16:04, cl@isbd.net wrote:
While I'm planning my new system the possibility of a dual display arises (at very little cost as far as I can see). Does Linux support dual displays and, if so, in what sort of way does it do it?
Xfree86 and Xorg both support multi-head displays. I'm currently running three screens on *this box ;)
The important bit, once the two (or three) device, monitor, and screen sections have been defined is the Server Layout. Snipping from my active Xfree86 config:
Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "XFree86 Configured" Screen 0 "Screen1" 0 0 Screen 1 "Screen0" RightOf "Screen1" Screen 2 "Screen2" LeftOf "Screen1" InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" EndSection
Section "ServerFlags" Option "Xinerama" "1" EndSection
Regards, Paul.
** cl@isbd.net cl@isbd.net [2006-09-13 16:28]:
While I'm planning my new system the possibility of a dual display arises (at very little cost as far as I can see). Does Linux support dual displays and, if so, in what sort of way does it do it?
I going to go very 'main stream' by choosing an AMD Dual Core processor and Nvidia graphics unless there's a very good reason to choose anything else. (I might be persuaded to go 'all Intel' with a Core 2 Duo processor if there are good reasons for doing so though)
** end quote [cl@isbd.net]
Yes it does. You can either use two cards (although one has to be PCI then in most cases), or a dual head card. A good number (most or all?) of nVidia cards (and probably others) have a dual connector on the back for DVI and standard VGA, and it is possible to set this up with an appropriate Xorg (or XFree86) configuration. The nVidia drivers support something called TwinView for this or Xinerama. My original dual screen setup was with a nVidia card and an old Matrox one and I blogged about it [1] if that is of any help getting you going. I haven't actually tried configuring my new nVidia card yet. I should add that TwinView is part of the proprietary nVidia drivers in case you have an objection to that :)
[1] http://www.linuxlore.co.uk/cgi/weblog.pl/2005/10/11#dualhead
-
cl＠isbd.net -
Paul -
Paul Tansom