Wednesday, October 12, 2005

I am a dual-monitor whore

After months of annoyance that my laptop could use dual monitors in Windows, but not when I booted Linux, I finally got it working tonight. Ahhh... sweet, sweet screen space, how I adore you.

The laptop is a IBM Thinkpad, T42, 2378-FZU. I've been running Ubuntu on it, and I'm very happy with it so far (the laptop as well as Ubuntu). It uses an ATI Radeon Mobility 7500, so I can't use ATI's latest Linux drivers or the fglrx drivers. But, the 'ati' driver seems to be working OK.

I mostly use the system to program. So, I don't need 3D speed and haven't bothered tweaking those settings.

The magic combination of changes appeared to be adding the Screen element to the second Device section, and then updating ServerLayout to use Xinerama and setup the screens:

...
Section "Device"
Identifier "video1"
Driver "ati"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "UseFBDev" "true"
Screen 1
EndSection

...

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Default Screen"
Screen 1 "External Screen" RightOf "Default Screen"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
InputDevice "Configured Mouse"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
Option "Xinerama" "on"
Option "Clone" "off"
EndSection
...



Of course, now that I've got it working... I found a cleaner-looking example on the web.