On 09/22/10 11:12, Kent West wrote:
Off-and-on for the past two years I've had multi-display working; for the past year, nada. It worked until an update on my Sid box.Since then, I've tried wiping my drive and reinstalling Stable, and swapping out between my three available cards.A lot of the problem is that I don't know what's the current way to do things; I used to use Xinerama, but that's been deprecated, and the docs I've found on xRandR don't answer the questions I have, etc. Another part of the problem may be that I've got old video cards (but they used to work!!!).Here's what I've got: westk@westek:~$ lspci | grep VGA00:05.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C51PV [GeForce 6150] (rev a2) 04:06.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV18 [GeForce4 MX 4000] (rev c1)I've tried every variation of xorg.conf I can think of (nv, vesa, nouveau as the drivers; blacklisting nouveau in /etc/modules/blacklist; Xinerama on; Xinerama off; etc etc etc), and I get one of four results:* first monitor displays a working X session (at various resolution capabilities, depending on the driver used) and the second monitor stays dark* first monitor displays a working X session (at various resolution capabilities, depending on the driver used) and the second monitor shows the video card's splash screen but doesn't participate otherwise as an X screen.* same as above until I open an app a half minute after the screen appears (or maybe it's just a half-minute after the screen appears) and the machine locks up hard (at console; I can still get to it via ssh usually)* the machine locks up hard before an X screen shows (at console - I can still get to it via ssh usually)Can anyone give me a definitive answer that this hardware will work in multi-display format?
Based from recent experience, yes, this is completely attainable with your hardware. Though you are stuck using the provided binary blob. With no Xrandr support. I am successfully running a Geforce 7200 pci-e card with dual vga outputs along with a Geforce 6200 pci card. The trick is ensuring that your cards are in the same "generation" and you'll have to install the legacy drivers and you should have no problems.
From asking around, and reading the pertinent documentation I have found out that nv, is unable to support this setup and that nouveau is not designed to do it either.
To shortcut your issue, I'd maybe look at an older Geforce cards with dual outputs on ebay or something similar, locally I can pick up a 6000 series for dual head mode for less than $20.
Can anyone give me a definitive answer how to make it work?
Well I can provide the xorg.conf file, but you won't necessarily learn much from it as it was purely generated by the nvidia-settings program. It just got it right for me, this is after 10 or so attempts to do it by hand, which was mostly successful, but my screen numbering always turned out wrong, and as I am using a tiled window manager, this was a big hassle for me.
Try the nvidia-settings config first, if it doesn't work for you I can post my config.
When I get the first monitor working, I can run "xrandr -1", and the screen goes blank for 3 or 5 seconds, and then reports:westk@westek:~$ xrandr -q Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 4096 x 4096VGA-1 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 338mm x 270mm1280x1024 60.0*+ 75.0 1152x864 75.0 1024x768 75.1 60.0 800x600 75.0 60.3 640x480 75.0 60.0 720x400 70.1 DVI-D-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) TV-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) As far as I can tell, xrandr only sees one card, only sees one monitor. Thanks for any help!
Hope you get 'er rolling.PS. I can still get my tdfx pci card still working along side these two others for a 5 monitor setup, I'd do it if I had the physical desk space :).