Support for Multiple Monitors

[EABonney]

I have a setup from my old office of 3 19" flat screen monitors. I would like to use this now in my home office which runs a linux box and an XP laptop on a docking station. My goal is to have the XP laptop showing on one of the monitors and then to have the other two for my linux box.

I am running Debian Etch with the latest patches and kernel 2.6.18-6-686.

Dos Linux support multiple monitors easily? I am not a linux newbie, but I am not a techie either.

I did try to set it up last night but the first stumbling block that I ran into was that when I plugged one of the monitors into my linux box and then booted the machine, the display was only at 640x480 and I had no other options under KDE or xrandr. Now I know that the video card supports at least up to 1280x1024 because that is was it is running at now with my Dell monitor. The 3 monitor setup support at least up to 1900x?? as that is what I was using in my office under XP.

So the first question might be why am I losing resolution when I plug these monitors into my linux box and is there a way to fix it? I have checked my xconfig file in /etc/X11 and it shows my Dell Monitor and the correct resolutions, but nothing for the new monitors under devices. I am not sure how to check the logs to see what the system is recognizing for a monitor with the new ones plugged in. I did do a "dmesg" but I couldn't see anything in the output indicating monitors or resolution.

Any pointers at this point would be helpful.

Thanks,
-Eric

[coopstah13]

what is your graphics card? post output of

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep Driver

[EABonney]

Thanks for the reply.

Here is the output of that comman:

Driver "kbd"
Driver "mouse"
Driver "i810"

The linux box is a Dell Dimension 2400. It is around 4 or 5 years old as I recall and it is the stock video card that came with it. I do have two other ATI Radeon 9200LX video cards with 256MB on board ram that I was planning on putting into the machine so that I could plug in the extra monitors.

Is there a way to maybe disable the built-in video card and plug these two video cards into the box and make the system use them instead?

-Eric

[coopstah13]

if you need to use those anyway, might as well plug them in
post output of

lspci | grep VGA

[EABonney]

Ok I will give it a go here shortly and see what I get.

Thanks again for the help.

-Eric

[EABonney]

Looks like the system is finding the two video cards plus my built in one. Here is what I got:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE C hipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)
01:04.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO] (rev 01)
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO] (rev 01)

-Eric

[coopstah13]

ATI Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver 8.28.8

you need to download and install driver for ati cards, i am not sure if they come with something to configure xorg.conf for you

[EABonney]

Ok so I am making some progress...baby steps I guess.

I installed the debian package for the ATI drivers. (They where the same release number) and then I used aticonfig to modify the xconfig.conf file for a dual setup.

I used aticonfig --initial=dual-head and it made a series of changes to my xconfig.conf file.

I then proceeded to reboot and come back to a black screen instead of my KDM login screen. I unplugged the monitor and plugged it into my first ATI card and this time I got a message of Analog input, can not display in this mode. The other ATI card was just a black screen also, but I figure that is because the xconfig.conf file was set only for two screens.

I had to go back to the console login and recopy the original xconfig.conf file back so that I could get back into KDE.

I am sure that there are adjustments that I need to make to the xconfig.conf file so I am going to go off and do some google work, but if anyone has any pointers or tips that I can use for research it is appreciated.

Thanks again for the help. I will get this working this weekend, just might take all weekend.

-Eric

[rockaway]

I have a setup from my old office of 3 19" flat screen monitors. I would like to use this now in my home office which runs a linux box and an XP laptop on a docking station. My goal is to have the XP laptop showing on one of the monitors and then to have the other two for my linux box.

I am running Debian Etch with the latest patches and kernel 2.6.18-6-686.

Dos Linux support multiple monitors easily? I am not a linux newbie, but I am not a techie either.

I did try to set it up last night but the first stumbling block that I ran into was that when I plugged one of the monitors into my linux box and then booted the machine, the display was only at 640x480 and I had no other options under KDE or xrandr. Now I know that the video card supports at least up to 1280x1024 because that is was it is running at now with my Dell monitor. The 3 monitor setup support at least up to 1900x?? as that is what I was using in my office under XP.

So the first question might be why am I losing resolution when I plug these monitors into my linux box and is there a way to fix it? I have checked my xconfig file in /etc/X11 and it shows my Dell Monitor and the correct resolutions, but nothing for the new monitors under devices. I am not sure how to check the logs to see what the system is recognizing for a monitor with the new ones plugged in. I did do a "dmesg" but I couldn't see anything in the output indicating monitors or resolution.

Any pointers at this point would be helpful.

Thanks,
-Eric

The query is a bit big and so will the answer be.Your solution ain't that tough.Click here to read in detail.

[EABonney]

The query is a bit big and so will the answer be.Your solution ain't that tough.Click here to read in detail.

Although there is a lot of great information here, it is mainly geared towards WinXP.

I appreciate the help and your link actually gave me an idea of a way to share one keyboard and mouse between my two setups, so it wasn't completely a waste of a read.

Thanks and I am back to the drawing board...

-Eric