[SWLUG] Matrox dual-head

[Phil Downer]

G Watkins wrote:
> Does anybody out there have dual displays working on a Red-Hat-type
> system using a Matrox MGA450 or MGA550?

I have a Matrox 450 working with Dual Head on Debian, if you like I
could send you my XF86-config file?

> I tried to configure things using Powerdesk, and for a while had
> everything working so that I had one large desktop extending across
> both screens. But attempts to configure so that I had a separate
> desktop on each screen have led to the X-server crashing on start-up.
> If anyone has done this successfully, and made notes about it, I'd be
> very grateful for a copy.

The one large desktop was probably due to you running Xinerama you'd
have to turn that off to get seperate desktops.

www.debianplanet.org has a very good article on this and I actually
followed this article when setting up my dual head. The article will
also be relevant for Red Hat systems and should be at
http://www.debianplanet.org/article.php?sid=256&mode=thread&order=0

I did play with Powerdesk a while ago and found it useless as it didn't
like my set up until I had actually manually configured X and had dual
head working. But once my setup was working Powerdesk would allow me to
change a few settings.

I found that in order to get two desktops working I actually run
Enlightenment twice, it took me a while to figure this out. I know have
Enlightenment with Gnome on Desktop 0 and just Enlightenment on Desktop 1.


> And a more basic question: How can I stop the X-server repeatedly trying
> to start itself on boot-up? (I looked for a likely process to kill
> but couldn't see one.) Where (apart from one screen I saw when I
> first installed RH71) is the configuration of whether to start in text
> or graphic mode?

If you're getting a graphical logon prompt then it's probably either GDM
or XDM pressing ctrl + alt + F1 or F2 from this screen will get you to a
 text mode login. If you then login and do a ps -e it should list
everything running if you have xdm or gdm running you'll probably want
to uninstall it.

Phil.