[ubuntu-uk] setting up dual screen with a dual head graphics card

[Rob Beard]

On Wed, 2008-03-05 at 19:43 +0000, Farran wrote:
> Hi all, especially Rob cos I saw he mentioned this...
> 
> how do I get my nVidia GT8600 to do dual screen? There's a DVI port
> and a VGA port, but only one of them will give an image at a time when
> two monitors are plugged in - the DVI. Why is this? The screen setup
> doesn't detect the second screen.
> As far as I know, i have not installed twinview or anything else
> manually: don't know if it comes pre-installed...
> 
> Thanks in advance if anyone can help :D

Well I've only managed to get dual screens working with an ATI card
(which isn't what I want in the long term but it works for now) and I
can only get the same resolution over both screens (1280x768), but for
starters I'd have a look under System -> Administration -> Screens &
Graphics.

>From here you should be able to configure the second screen assuming
that it's detected okay (on my PC it detects two Screen 1s and I can use
either of them but not both at the same time).  I think the idea is you
can select Screen 2 to extend the desktop so it's right, left, above or
below Screen 1, or you could make Screen 2 the default Screen and have
Screen 1 beside it.

I can't get this working properly with Gusty and I've also tried the
8.04 Alpha 5 and this doesn't even detect the cards (not a good start).

If this doesn't work then you might want to look at using the NVidia
proprietary drivers which I believe has it's own NVidia control panel
for configuring such things as dual screens (does anyone know if there
is an equivalent for ATI using fglrx or the ATI drivers?).

Hopefully this should give you something to go on.  I think I'm going to
leave my configuration as it is until the weekend when I'll have more
time to play.

Good luck with it.

Rob