Re: Recommendation for dual head video card
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 08:27:37PM -0800, Bill Moseley wrote:
> > Hum, well I need to read more. I thought it was Xinerama that made the
> > dual head thing workable -- using two as if one screen.
Marc Wilson <msw@cox.net> writes:
> Yep, that's what Xinerama does. Badly. :) But it's certainly not required
> for supporting multiple monitors... X has known how to do *that* for years.
Xinerama doesn't work so badly for me. Granted, it's not perfect, but
I find it quite useable.
I run standard Debian woody (stable) software: XFree86 4.1.0, GNOME
1.4, sawfish-gnome 1.0.1.20020116-3.
My two heads are attached to a Matrox G400 card. I had to download a
device driver from Matrox's web site, the one in XFree86 didn't
support Xinerama. It did take some fiddling to get everything working
(mostly fooling around with /etc/X11/XF86config-4, which is not my
idea of fun).
One monitor is a 20" Dell at 1156x864, the second is a 17" Sony at
1024x768. Xinerama presents this as a single 2176x864 display (side
by side). There's a small 1024x96 rectangle missing from the bottom
of the smaller display (which is on the right). This causes
surprisingly few problems. I'd prefer to have two identical displays.
But, I'm using what I've got and it works surprisingly well.
GNOME 1.4 is not dual-head aware, but its panel fits on the bottom of
the larger display, and the session manager handles window positions
correctly. Sawfish works quite well with Xinerama. It supports
multiple dual-screen workspaces. It rarely brings up windows spanning
the two screens, most are completely within one or the other. It's
easy to drag a window from one screen to the other, and often quite
useful.
Some applications really benefit from having multiple windows on
multiple monitors. Xemacs, galeon, and ardour (a multitrack audio
recorder) are good examples. I'm reading this mailing list using
xemacs and gnus with the *Summary* buffer on one monitor and the
*Article* buffer on the other. That's really nice.
Overall, I like it a lot... :-)
--
Jack O'Quin
Austin, Texas, USA
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