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Xinerama Xfree86 ver4.2.1.1 question



Hello everyone,

I am running unstable.

I am trying to get Xinerama working on a Matrox G400 card. It is an AGP card with dual display heads (2 monitor outputs).

It is confirmed working with Xfree86 ver4.2.1.1 because I have been running X/Gnome/Kde on it before, its just that now I want to see if it works with 2 monitors.

I configured the card in 3 ways, of which 1 was better than the other 2. As I understand it, Xinerama means that you can "expand" your desktop over 2 monitors. Meaning, drag and drop across the monitors and have only one mouse cursor which moves between the 2 desktops.

The 1st way that I configured it was to follow the Xinerama HOWTO by Dennis Baker (available at www.tldp.org and many many other places). The only difference was that I ommitted the "BUSID 'PCI:1:0:0" option and did not use it in my XF86Config-4. It 'worked' meaning that both displays were active and clear. However, what it did was duplicate or clone my desktop so that the same thing that I did on one desktop happened on the other. Just like 2 TVs tuned to the same TV station at the same time. This, though working, is not what I was aiming for.

The 2nd way was that I specified the same file, but I use the "BUSID" option mentioned in the above paragraph. What happened was that the first display worked correctly, however the 2nd display gave garbled output. I could see the general colour of the 1st display, but it was garbled and unusable on the 2nd display.

The 3rd way I did it was use the "mgapdesk" utility (by #apt-get install mgapdesk"). It configured XF86Config-4 itself and it gave the same garbled output as the 2nd way. I checked its generated XF86Config-4 and found that it also used the "BUSID" option.

How do I proceed further to make Xinerama work. I did some research on the Debian situation and came up with some threads that suggested Xinerama was disabled on KDE (some issue with a library, I don't remember). I could not find much else so I assume it works on GNOME atleast. I also saw the howto on DebianPlanet.org about the g400 stuff, and it did not work either.

Would my XF86Config-4 file and anything else be helpful if I posted it? If I have missed giving out any information, I would gladly do so if you tell me.

Thank you for all your help.
--
Harshwardhan Nagaonkar
Electrical Engineering Sysop
Brigham Young University, UT-84602



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