[Sussex] 2 monitors, one machine

[Paul Tansom]

** Pybe <squalidstuff at gmail.com> [2005-10-19 23:16]:
> As you already have one card just buy another cheap one (doesnt need to be
> dual head) stick it in so you have two cards and away you go. On 2k, xp,
> fedora 1/2/3 and ubuntu warty I have had 3 cards to 3 monitors working fine.
> Any old spare cards you have lying around will be fine.
> 
> Pybe
** end quote [Pybe]

True enough, that is pretty much what I'm running at the moment with a
64M nVidia card and a 8M Matrox Millennium. That said, and the main
reason to actually reply to this, I am working on switching to dual head
on a single card. I am doing this because it is largely impractical to
sort out twin cards without using a pretty ancient second card. I did
track down a 64M PCI nVidia based card, but I then realised that it was
possible to use my existing nVidia based card as a dual head. All you
need is a card that supports the nView capabilities of the chipset
(depending on which nVidia chipset you have!).

Anyway, I've tested this under Windows and it was simply a matter of
getting a converter for the DVI connector so I could hook it up to my
standard VGA screen. The card detected this and added the necessary
options in the display properties for me to configure it.

I have now pulled the card from the Windows box and put it into the
Linux one. The first issue was X failing completely (I'm still on
XFree86 sadly - although this wasn't the issue I don't think). This was
rectified my abandoning the vesa driver (only one I had working with the
old MX 440 chipset) and switching to the nv one (which briefly worked
iirc, but works fine with the new FX 5200 chipset).

The next challenge is to install the official nVidia drivers (since
these are the only ones that support the dual head capabilities) and see
if I can get them working. Has anyone tried this? It isn't very purist,
but given the price of a nView compatible 128M card it seems worth
trying.

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com