LincolnBlogs

I realize I haven’t written anything here in a bit, but that doesn’t men I haven’t done any nifty Linuxy things. I have been wrestling, lately, with some screen realestate problems….

At work I got assigned a laptop to use as my workstation, and this laptop comes with a docking station. Now this dock was hooked to a nice lcd monitor, but I did notice that most of my coworkers had dial displays. Being low-man on the totem pole I didn’t give it much thought until recently when I came across a spare lcd monitor I could use as a second. Since some other people are using dual displays on the same hardware under windows, I assumed that I could, in fact, do it with Linux as well.

The laptop uses an ATI video card, and after upgrading to the latest and greatest ATI driver and creating a xorg.conf with aticonfig, I was quite pleased to see working dual displays. This wasn’t hard to get working once I found the correct information. Unfortunately, I had a real problem getting this set up *just right*. While the dual screen works, one screen is offset just a little bit, and it’s just enough to drive me crazy. I have tried everything in the book to tweak it out for about three days until I got too annoyed and just went back to one monitor (to keep my sanity).

After all that, a coworker brought his laptop in that he just installed Slackware on and one of his problems/questions was the video resolution. This is a newer laptop running ATI video and a widescreen display. Well, a quick google gave good results on getting this going properly, and the solution was, again, install the new ATI driver, and you can use aticonfig to generate a xorg.conf file. This, again, worked well, however, with one small problem. The resolution was *stuck* quite high and the only adjustment I could make was to get it very low at about 640×480. Again, ATI almost there but not quite…

Forward to today where I *finally* got around to trying dual monitors on my home machine. The difference here is that my machine has nvidia for video. I plugged in another monitor and got a blank display, which was kind of disheartening. I did some quick research on the net and found some good directions on the Ubuntu forums on this. Apparently you add the twinview option to your xorg.conf and it’s just supposed to work. Well, guess what? It does! This is truely goovy to have 3 lcf screens on my desk (1-widescreen mac, 2-17 inch hooked to my main workstation (linux)).

Moral of the story: When you want dual monitors, use Nvidia.