[Gllug] Dual monitor setup

[Nix]

On 21 Jan 2010, Simon Perry stated:

> Dylan wrote:
>> Hi All,
>> 
>> I would like to achieve the following: I have two screens, an LCD TV and a 
>> standard monitor. Both have vga and hdmi/dvi connections. Ideally, I'd like 
>> to have two users, one of which always uses the TV (for watching streamed TV 
>> or media players), and the other which normally uses the monitor for email, 
>> browsing, etc, but can optionally use the TV for graphics work etc. I 
>> particularly want to achieve this with only one machine - there's physical 
>> space and electricity consumption to consider.
>> 
> It sounds like you want a dual head setup but for that you will need a 
> second graphics card.

That does depend on the card. Nearly a year ago now I bought a machine
with a Radeon HD 4870, which has dual digital outputs. Good free
software support by now (well, not 3D shaders, but nobody in the free
software world has those yet: but we have simple 3D and kernel
modesetting and everything).

> This used to be trivial to setup as X -configure would reliably guess 
> the correct configuration. However recent Kernels and X versions have 
> managed to break the functionality. For Ubuntu at least anything newer 
> than Hardy will hit the following bug.
>
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18160
>
> I believe it is fixed in Xorg 1.7 but that's a few months off.

I've been running it here (not on Ubuntu) for a few months now. It
works.
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