SOLVED quad-head display

[Interlug Lists]

On Nov 15, 2007 4:47 PM, Interlug Lists <interluglists-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:

[ earlier, I said]

> I'm messing with my monitor setup.  I've been running dual-head for a
> while and like it.  Now I'm messing with quad-head, and have the
> basics working.

This was on Feisty.  The game has changed with Gutsy (see below) but
for Feisty, this worked.

I should summarize what I did to get a quad-head display working:

0) I started with a working dual head xinerama configuration
1) install additional video card and grab the pci ID from lspci (2:6:0
in this case)
2) reboot, drop to console, kill gdm
3) jiggle xorg.conf to duplicate xinerama settings from monitors #0
and #1, for #2 and #3
4) startx to find out if I am anywhere close.
5) reboot to confirm

4) and 5) were a bit weird.  Perhaps a driver issue.  I got to the
point where I could startx and get video on all outputs, though #2 and
#3 were garbled.  They were mostly the wallpaper colour and I could
see where the mouse was by a large moving square.  Lots of "random"
static-y changes on #2 and #3 whenever the display on #0 or #1
changed.

This might have been fixed when I rebooted, or when I changed the bios
settings to look for the agp card first.

==Problems caused by a quad-head display==
I setup as four-across during my tests.  The two "problems" I ran into were:
1) I need a wider mouse pad.
2) What should I use for wallpaper?
It was a fun little experiment.

==What about quad-head on Gutsy?==
I haven't resolved that yet.  Gutsy implemented Bulletproof X and
xrandr.  The bulletproof X is pretty cool, as I was able to remove
xorg.conf and the system built a working display without any help from
me.  Doing this with multiple monitors gives a cloned display, and
that's just fine, but not what I was looking for.  Turns out that
xrandr only recognizes one of my dual-head cards, so xrandr and quad
will not work for me with this setup.

I may try removing xrandr and going back to xinerama.

I'll also have a look at framebuffer.

Thanks for all of the tips. I'll report back once I have things working.
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