Dual Display help

[cdrradar]

I'm attempting to set up my X setup for a true dual display setup. The idea being, the CRT is for control, the TV for output - a classic DVD setup, for example. (IMHO, anyway!) I tried TwinView, but boy was that messed up - the output window would stretch across the monitors, and that's not good! Bad experiences under Windoze in trying to pull this off. I remember doing it using TwinView with one display disabled using NULLs in metamodes: "1024x768", NULL ; NULL, "1024x768" and modeswitching. However, DVD viewing is not the only reason for doing it this way.

The latest error message was "Fatal server error: Requested entity already in use!" I read the README file as a guide, but with this error, I'm completely baffled. :confused:

My current setup works as a single monitor setup.

On with the details:

CPU: Intel Pentium 3 733MHz 133MHz FSB
Memory: 256M SDRAM
Base distribution: Linux Slackware 8.1
Kernel: 2.4.18
GCC 2.95.3
Make 3.79.1
NVDriver set: 1.0.3123
Note: 4xxx hung my machine - rolled back
X system: 4.2.0
Dropline GNOME 2.x (Version not known exactly)
Card: Xtasy GeForce 4 Ti 4200 128M DDR
AGP running at 2x
Primary monitor: Micron 700 DDC compatible
Secondary monitor: SVideo compatible display

That's all well and good - attached is the XF86Config file.

Possible gotchas I can think of:
- I'm not sure if I have the right PCI bus setting in the BusId option in the Device section. Shouldn't this be the AGP bus anyway? I looked at the XFree86 log file to determine if I got the right one. I *think* so, but I may be wrong. I never needed the BusId setting in the single-monitor setup.
- Perhaps X doesn't like using the same BusId to drive two distinct displays? According to Appendix R, it seems that's the way to do it.

Help on this, please!

[cdrradar]

Attached to this reply is /var/log/XFree86.0.log that resulted from the last attempt with the above config file. X was invoked with "startx -- -logverbose 5"

Thoughts?

[hopey]

Sorry that I can't help you but I've been trying to solve this problem myself without luck. I thought that the true 2 display mode was a new feature of 4XXX (whatever) drivers?

With twinview I got horizontal "lines" from my tv both in windows and linux when watching movies. Two separate screens in windows worked fine. I haven't been able to work this out in linux. If someone is interested of my XFree86 file and error messages, check my previous post.

This is now only thing that keeps me from switching to linux (and I have heard and said this before). Too bad.

Separate display modes should be easier way of handling things in x windows. I didn't have problems to set up x server and using my linux box from windows machine with cygwin in my lan. First time I tried dual monitor support with x was several years ago with matrox g450 card and it worked fine. Back then the problem was that windows dll hack that was used in divx playback was too slow on my 400mhz cpu.

If someone has working XFree86 file, please send it so I can check what I'm doing wrong this time, or maybe I'll have to wait few more years ;)

hopey

[hopey]

Check out this file from matrox:

ftp://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/archive/linux/2002/lnx200notes.txt

Maybe you are right that the pci bus can't be same for both screens. In above it was said for multi-monitor support that:

# ************************************************** ***************
# Graphics device section
# ************************************************** ***************

Section "Device"
Identifier "G200_1"
Driver "mga"
BusID "PCI:2:0:0"
Option "hw cursor" "off"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "G200_2"
Driver "mga"
BusID "PCI:2:4:0"
Option "hw cursor" "off"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "G200_3"
Driver "mga"
BusID "PCI:2:8:0"
Option "hw cursor" "off"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "G200_4"
Driver "mga"
BusID "PCI:2:12:0"
Option "hw cursor" "off"
EndSection

So the busid isn't same. Any ideas?

hopey

[cdrradar]

Turns out that in order to get it to work, I needed to use the 1.0.4191 version of the driver. It works, but I now have to get applications to use the second display as appropriate, ie ogle, mplayer, XMMS, and so on. I have a separate problem, which I'll start another thread on.