Q: how to do 2 monitors, 1 desktop (jaunty 9.04, ati radeon, catalyst)

[Liam Proven]

2009/7/26 Rei Shinozuka <shino at panix.com>:
> i'm an intermediate ubuntu user, (2 years, with 7-8 years red hat before
> that and solaris & bsd since 87.) i've never had a multi-monitor
> setup.
>
> i'd like to know how to arrange 2 monitors to be a single desktop,
> (one set of menus, windows draggable from one screen to the other
> and so on.)
>
> i'm running 9.04 jaunty on a 3.2ghz quad-core, 8GB ram, and an ati radeon 4350
> card with one monitor on the hdmi port and one on the dvi port, each
> connected to 1980x1080 dell monitors.  right now, there are 2 desktops,
> both functional but independent (each one has its own menubar)
>
> i am using the ati catalyst 9.7 drivers.
>
> i'm a little hazy on the various drivers, xinerama, xrandrm and so
> on.  i like to have the full resolution (which i have now), like
> to keep conpiz (but not a deal-breaker), and 3D is similarly not a big
> deal.
>
> thanks in advance,
>
> -rei
>
> --
> Rei Shinozuka shino at panix.com
> Ridgewood, New Jersey

Never tried it with an ATI card, but I've been running Linux multihead
for about a decade now.

On my old Matrox setup - I started with 2 PCI Matrox Millennium II
boards - I had to manually edit xfree86.conf or something, to
explicitly enable Xinerama.

Then I got a newer PC with a Matrox G400 dual head. That needed
similar setup plus the Matrox proprietary drivers.

Then I got a newer PC with a Matrox G550. This was much the same. This
is roughly when I switched from SuSE to Ubuntu. Ubuntu monitor setup
is terrible - Suse and Xandros did better in the late 1990s. At first,
I just set it up how I wanted in SUSE, which did it all automagically,
then I copied the xorg.conf file over into Ubuntu.

Then I got a newer PC with a dual-port nVidia GeForce 5600 and then
with the nVidia proprietary binary driver it's just a tick-box in
nvidia-settings.

I can't advise on ATI but I am sure Google can.


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