[Sussex] Multiple screens using USB to VGA converters

[James Pybus]

I have had a similar experience with on board and the agp slot as it seems the agp part is shared so its one or the other that will work, but in these cases you can usually use an old pci graphics card instead of an agp one and it will work fine. Obviously they are not as good so it depends on what the usage is, if its just coding etc you should be ok.


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-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Dobson <steve at dobson.org>

Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:47:50 
To:Sussex LUG <sussex at mailman.lug.org.uk>
Subject: Re: [Sussex] Multiple screens using USB to VGA converters


Morning Brendan,

Sorry I didn't get back to you last night, I was busy and didn't feel
like reading my e-mails before going to bed.

On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 20:09 +0000, Brendan Whelan wrote:
<snip>
> If I go for the simpler option of using graphics cards, is it 
> possible to continue to use the VGA output on the motherboard and 
> configure the second screen on another graphics card?

This is where my knowledge is limited as it has to depend on the
motherboard/BIOS and the VGA controller card that you're using.  At the
end of the day what you need is for the Linux kernel to be able to see
both VGA devices after boot.

If I were you I'd plug in the second card, attach a second monitor and
let the thing boot.  Maybe it will use the on-board, or maybe it will
use the new card.  When its up run lspci(8) and see if both VGA
controllers are listed.  If they are then you're good to go and
configure Xorg to used both devices; see the web for details.

IIRC a VIA based mini-ITX motherboard I played with disabled the
on-board if a VGA controllers was plugged in.  A quick Google search
show some people having problems disabling the on-board when they
plugged a better video card in.  So if you only see the one controller,
and it's the new card, then reboot into the BIOS and see if you can
enabled the on-board when  a second VGA controllers is present.  My
guess would be that you will always see VGA controller card.

Steve

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