Adding a second monitor

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 8:43 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 24 June 2012 16:33, Avi Greenbury <lists at avi.co> wrote:
>> Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
>>> So, given that I have a large PCI-E slot and a regular PCI-X slot
>>> empty, I'm wondering...
>>> 1) Should I expect X to manage 2 cards, and if so what should I do
>>> besides just plugging them in?
>>
>> In general, X is happy with two monitors on one card, and anything else
>> is still considered esoteric. There are a few multi-card setups that
>> are known to work, and several that don't.
>>
>> In general, you will need to co-operative cards and a non-free
>> driver that works with both. I'm pretty sure that this works in NVidia
>> with the right cards, their driver and their Twinview tool, but it does
>> leave your setup's reliance very much in the hands of NVidia
>
> Sounds more or less right.
>
> In my experience, by rule of thumb rather than hard-and-fast absolutes:
>
> * a pair of 2 identical single-port cards is fairly likely to work
>
> * if cards need proprietary drivers, make sure both need the *same*
> driver - e.g. 2 nVidias of the same generation, or 2 ATIs of the same
> generation
>
> * a pair of 2 cards where the drivers are FOSS, good, modern & support
> multihead has a fair chance
>
> * don't mix & match cards where one requires a proprietary drive & the
> other doesn't
>
> * don't mix & match cards that need proprietary drivers - e.g. 1 × ATI
> + 1 × nVidia
>
> * don't mix generations - e.g. random old weird thing + modern card is
> not a good choice.
>
> * if you have motherboard graphics + an AGP slot, you can't combine
> them; only 1 AGP device at a time is possible. AGP+PCI works, though
>
> --
> Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile

Thanks.  Looking at the nvidia stuff on this card, and what you wrote,
it seems I should be able to put 2 monitors on this one card.
However, I can't seem to figure out how to configure this.

nvidia-xconfig generates a config with a single monitor section,
identical except for whitespace to what I have now.  Adding the
--enable-all-gpus option produces an error message to the effect that
it could not figure out how many gpus there were.  None of the other
options seemed likely to help.

I'm starting to wonder if a fresh install of 12.04 might figure this
out for me.  I was going to wait for 12.04.1, but this might encourage
me a bit.


-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD