Bill Ehlert wrote:
> Hi Bryan,
> You mentioned your dual-headed desktop in a response to Brian Coyle.
> I am very interested in using two video cards and monitors on a Red Hat 7.1
> Linux box. Do you have suggestions or tips on how to do this?
Yes, there are two ways to do this:
1. Unified frame buffer (vendor-specific)
2. XFree86 4's Xinerama
Unified frame buffer is a what nVidia and Matrox use, either with
one card with multiple outputs (and the controller supports
simultaneous display -- e.g., nVidia's TwinView) or multiple cards
that can work together as such. The driver presents the card(s) as
a single "frame buffer" for display to XFree86, and things they are
a single card. You _can_ have 3-D acceleration over the entire
frame buffer in such case, depending on the capabilities of the
driver. This also means the driver must handle all the monitor
info, at least for the second (or 3rd+) heads.
Now XFree86-4 introduces the ability to have multiple cards with
multiple screens without any vendor support. The cards don't need
to know anything about each other, nor do you have to use specific
PCI, AGP, etc... versions. In your XFree86 config file, you assign
the card/monitor combinations and their location in reference to
each other. The cards are then assigned screen :0, :1, etc... in
sequence. You then use "Xinerama" (which is really just a X-runtime
switch) to "rebind" all non-:0 screens into a single :0 screen. Now
it appears to your programs that you have a single :0 screen.
Unfortunately, you won't get hardware 3-D acceleration (for obvious
inter-vendor dependency reasons).
In your case, we'll need to use Xinerama. If you send me your card
and monitor info, I'll create an XFree86-4 file for you.
> I am not into games at the moment, but would like to use two monitors
> - one for console and the other for a GNOME desktop. Any pointers you
> may have will really help.
Actually, you can do that without any special configuration, even on
old XFree86 versions. You just tell XFree86 to use your non-primary
video card. That way, your console stays on your primary video
card, and XFree86 uses the other. The "primary" video card is
defined by the BIOS, and often selectable. It goes PCI (lowest slot
# to highest), then AGP although, again, this is usually modifyable
in most BIOSes.
-- TheBS
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org chat:thebs413 Engineer AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc. http://www.linux-wlan.org President SmithConcepts, Inc. http://www.SmithConcepts.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- The US National ID is an enhanced Social Security Number. It will give those who abuse it more information than ever before. And just like the SSN, they will ignore all the regulations.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 15:28:55 EDT