Comments on: Enabling Xinerama in Ubuntu

By: caskey

caskey — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:19:57 +0000

I’m closing comments on this because of overwhelming automated comment spam (about 50/day on this post alone). I’m happy to post your comments if you email them to me directly.

By: David

David — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:28:48 +0000

I concur with Norman’s observation. This is the only “how to” that I have found that worked.

By: Norman

Norman — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:07:39 +0000

Thank you. This is the best HowTo on the topic I’ve read, and I’ve read more than I’d have liked. And thank you too, Larry Lynn, you saved me a whole lot of hassle!

By: Jake

Jake — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:48:21 +0000

I found that I needed to turn off the composite function, as the terminal (xterm, gnome, etc) would not come up when I added the second monitor (with a Nvidia card). I guess nvidia does not support it (?). This was added to my xorg.conf,

Section “Extensions”
Option “Composite” “false”
EndSection

By: Jadi

Jadi — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:32:36 +0000

Hi Just wanted to thank you. This was great. I’ve read maybe 5 articles and YOURS helped a lot. Now my DualHead is working.

By: Larry Lynn

Larry Lynn — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:08:42 +0000

Hi,
I just wanted to write & say thanks. I had been screwing around, trying to get a dual monitor setup to work on my ubuntu system for the better part of 5 hours before I stumbled accress your tutorial. This was the clearest & most relavent tutorail for the configuration I wanted. After I found your tutorial, I was able to get the dual monitor setup working in under an hour.

I did have a little bit of information to add. Your tutorial covers how to set up a system with multiple video cards controlling multiple monitors. I needed a setup where a single video card controlled 2 monitors. When I followed your instructions, I got the system to boot up & display, but not correctly. I had a duplicate image of the gdm gui on both monitors (2 duplicate desktops with 2 duplicate mouse pointers, both moving in sync & doing the same thing). I needed someting extra & figured it out by a process of trial & error.

My specs:
OS: Ubuntu 6.10
Video Card: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV100 QY [Radeon 7000/VE]
Monitors: 2 x DELL 1707FP

I actually got the key idea out of the man pages for xorg.conf.
The subsection for screens under the devices section noted that the ‘Screen’ option was mandatory for a single PCI entity that would be used to drive more than one display. It also stated that multiple devices sections in the configuration section would be necessary.

I ended up creating 2 “Device” sections, 1 for each screen. There is a lot of duplication between the 2 device sections. For instance , the 2 devices both use the same driver & BusID. The key difference is that one is set to screen 0 & one is set to screen 1.

Here’s a copy of the 2 device sections:

Section “Device”
Identifier “Screen0 of ATI Radeon 7000″
Driver “radeon”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
Option “MergedFB” “false”
Screen 0
EndSection

Section “Device”
Identifier “Screen1 of ATI Radeon 7000″
Driver “radeon”
BusID “PCI:1:0:0″
Option “MergedFB” “false”
Screen 1
EndSection

I ended up with 2 device sections, 2 monitor sections & 2 screen sections. (Actually’ there’s more – I kept the defaults available in case my employer repurposes the video card for something else & I need to go back to the builtin).

By: Olivier C.

Olivier C. — Fri, 11 May 2007 08:45:12 +0000

Hi,

Like Fred J I’m very often on the road and must be able to easily switch my second screen on/off, and switch from “clone” to “extended” mode (for presentations). I’m currently using KUbuntu 7.04 in a VMWare VM on Windows. I’m totally dependent on the flexibility of dual monitors, that’s the ONLY reason I’m still using Windows as main OS. I see from this excellent HowTo that it’s possible to use dual head, but can anyone confirm that it will do what I need? (easily switch between modes?) My current DELL Latitude D610 has an ATI mobile Radeon X300 card and I preferably use KDE.

Thanks in advance.

Olivier.

By: Fred J

Fred J — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 20:40:59 +0000

Thanks! This worked wonders.

Just wondering: I have a laptop setup with:

- Monitor to the left (external) and
- Laptop Monitor.

In Xineramam Mode under ubuntu dapper + gdm all apps are started on th eleft screen which is bad when i’m on the road again… Any idea how i can tweak gdm into starting everything on Screen0 (which is the laptop screen?)
(Card is a radeon rv350)

Woud really appreciate any help as google hasn’t turned up anything resourcefull yet. Thanks again!
Fred

By: Robin

Robin — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 10:03:10 +0000

There are some additional instructions here, particularly how to edit the xorg.conf in text console mode.

http://doc.gwos.org/index.php/ChangeResolution

By: squeaks

squeaks — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 23:07:58 +0000

Nevermind, my problem was in following ubuntuguide.org to modify my .xinitrc. Since I didn’t have one, I created it from an empty file and that caused X not to start properly.