So after a 6 month hiatus away from the dual head desktop setup I’ve decided to venture that way again. Nvidia has excellent linux driver support (what’s up ATI?) and using their binary X windows driver it’s really quite simple to implement dual head support. I simply added the following lines to my screen config in /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and restarted the X server.
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "NVIDIA0"
Monitor "BENQ P992"
DefaultDepth 24
Option "TwinView " "on"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024;1024x768,1024x768;1280x1024,NULL"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30 - 96.0"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50 - 120"
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection
With twinview enabled X is unaware that there are two display devices and two monitors, this is all done by the binary Nvidia driver. So far it’s working great, the xinerama extensions in the Nvidia driver are allowing most apps to start in one window even though the virtual screen is 2560 (1280 + 1280) pixels wide. There’s nothing more annoying than having applications constantly centered in between both monitors.
<crude joke> More head is better. </crude joke>
A quick google and I got dualhead working in 5 minutes on my new freebsd setup. Thank you kindly!
Awesome, glad I could help! You’re a braver sole than I, I’m still running linux on the desktop, I found freebsd’s support for my nvidia card (along with other desktopy things) was a little weak. I still run it on my network servers though, it’s hard to beat the ports system and freebsd’s networking stack.
Thanks, this was of great help in getting dualhead going on my debian desktop!