[GLLUG] Dual monitors on Ubuntu 14.04 with Gnome

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

[sorry if the email isn't well formatted, I'm on my phone]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014, Christina Nicolau wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 4:34 PM, michael norman
> <michaeltnorman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 18/09/14 15:50, Christina Nicolau wrote:
> >
> > > Hi everybody
> > >
> > > I am hoping there's anyone here able to help me set up dual
> > > monitors on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the latest Gnome desktop.
> > >
> > > What I want: dual monitors display (I have one on VGA and the
> > > other on DVI). By dual monitors display I mean having 2 monitors,
> > > moving windows between them, maximizing a window will expand it to
> > > just one monitor etc.

> > I am unfamiliar with Ubuntu and Gnome but if Gnome has an equivalent of
> > the hardware monitor settings button in whatever is the equivalent of
> > Control Center here check first that 2 monitors are found.  If not uncheck
> > same image on all monitors.
 
> You seem to be correct. The NVIDIA X Server Settings just does not see my
> second monitor. So uncheck same image on all monitors does not even exist
> in my settings (I have seen a screen shot of how that settings window is
> supposed to look like but mine does not have that option. Presumably is
> pops up just when multiple monitors are detected!).
 
Interesting.  This is the "nvidia-settings" binary?  You also have the
monitors section in gnome-control-panel yeah?

It's been a while since I've played with nvidia & X11 (Linux sysadmin is
done for us at Google) but from what I recall you need to use nvidia's
own settings binary to configure it.

It has it's own equivalent of Xinerama (the X11 multi-monitor extension)
TwinView.  Gnome should be able to understand both, but if not, it
should be possible to get the nvidia drivers to not use twinview and
fall back to X11's Xinerama extension.  But this may involve tweaking
your xorg.conf, getting that wrong can mean X can't start.

Do searches online for "xinerama" & "twinview", I see plenty of examples
of tweaking the xorg.conf to add entries for for these options which
yours didn't have.

 - Damion

-- 
Damion Yates - Google UK Ltd
Belgrave House, 76 Buckingham Palace Rd, London SW1W 9TQ - reg:3977902