[clue-tech] video issues I'd like help with at this months installfest

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Thu, 2009-01-08 at 17:15 -0700, David L. Anselmi wrote:
> Kevin Kempter wrote:
> > 2) I can't seem to figure out how to do a dual monitor setup
> Have you ever done that before?

In F10, some drivers are auto detected by the xorg core now.  They don't
even have an xorg.conf.  In some cases (such as the ATI Radeon 7000 I
have at work) you can use GNOME's configuration tools to enable dual
monitors.  I had to copy in my old xorg.conf to make this work.  In
other cases you may be able to use xrandr to manually configure the two
displays.  You should read the man page for your particular driver.  If
you don't know what driver you have, goto init 3, login as root and run
X -configure to generate /root/xorg.conf.new.  Then look in there for
the driver name.

Xinerama may be needed but I've found GNOME/latest-xorg-release seems to
handle that case fairly well now.  Don't know about KDE.

For the intel series of graphics chips, found primarily in laptop
computers or embedded on motherboards AFAIK, you have to manually
generate the xorg.conf and then specify a virtual size that fits the two
displays (assuming they share the same desktop).  Then you can use
xrandr.  With older intel chipsets (such as the i915 and earlier) you
may need to rebuild intel driver to make this work correctly.  There are
many reported problems with the intel driver in F10 working with dual
monitors, however I was able to get mine working.  If you need more
info, see my blog:
http://www.graphics-muse.org/wp/?p=314

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I might be a butterfly, dreaming I'm a man writing down my thoughts. - 
     Unknown, paraphrased from Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu