Two Heads

I have read over and over that having two screens on a single computer increases productivity by 20-30%. Linux has had dual monitor support via X for a while. What with one thing and another, the only computers I have ever actually done dual head support on before now were my laptops. While I liked it a great deal, especially for presentations, I have never had it at my desk with a machine that it is much more logical that I would have: my Linux desktop.

Ubuntu 7.10, and by extension, Mint 4.0 has a new monitor management widget with dual head support so that direct editing of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file is not longer required. I know there are serious geek points being lost here by admitting that I prefer not to edit the xorg.conf file directly unless I have to, but so be it. Fedora has had this dual head setup GUI widget for a long time, so all I can say is “About time there Ubuntu”.

The new Dell 745 running Mint 4.0 just needed a dual head card to make it happen. It has a PCI-E video card, and an on-board video card, but the BIOS won't let both be active at the same time. Doh.

Some quick research found a cheap one with the Nvidia GeForce 7300 GS chipset. This PCI-E card has a VGA port and a DVI port with a VGA adapter. Both the flat panels I have are VGA: Dell 197 FP and Dell 172FP. A 19 and a 17 inch panel, both 4:3 ratio. The 197 is whiter on the panel backlight, probably because it is newer.

I pulled the ATI based card out of the Dell 745, installed the nVidia based card, and booted. Linux Mint immediately told me it was in low resolution, and did I want to do anything about that. I click “yes”, and we went into the display setup do-dad. It saw I had two heads on the box, and let me configure them, and then continued the boot.

Once up, I had a weird desktop. It was in Xinerama mode, and the Dell 197FP was in 1024x768 mode, but the pan mode was in 1280x1024, so the desktop was all slippy slidy and panning all over the place when I moved the mouse. The 172FP was stuck in 1024x768 mode even though it can do 1280x1024 so once I 'slid' off the left panel onto the right hand one it would work right. Generally odd.

Clicking on the restricted drivers controller, and enabling the nVidia drivers did not change this. Going into the System / Administration / Screens and Graphics (I have the Gnome menus enabled, not the SLAB looking thing) applet, I poked around with various settings before figuring out a few things. No matter what I did in there though, I could not get the screens set up the way I wanted them to be. I could not get the 172FP out of 1024x768 mode. It worked, but the panel was doing some funny things to the fonts to make them look OK. Sort of like smooth but blurry.

I had read on the Mint wiki that the Envy app had been maintained in the Mint distro because it had more and better control over the screens than the current Ubuntu application did. I went to Applications / Systems Tools / Envy and fired that up. It asked if I wanted to install the nVidia drivers. I thought I had them on via the restricted source manager, but decided that there would be no harm if I said yes.

There was no harm, but I did not expect what happened. Envy pulled off the current nVidia packages, downloaded 76 new packages, re-compiled the driver, and finally launched the nVidia configuration applet.

I now had far better control of the system set up, but it took a bit more tweaking to get it to do what I wanted. First off I had to tell the applet that the right hand head was relative and to the right of the left hand head. And I had to be in Xinerama mode to allow things I clicked on in email to launch in the browser started on the right hand head, otherwise they were in separate X sessions and isolated from each other.

VMWare Server started and ran just fine on the new setup, and now I could make a full screen guest appear on the right hand screen and work with it at the same time as the left hand screen stayed talking to the host OS. Very cool.

One last oddity. I had to enable 'root' mode to be able to use the nVidia screen management widget. Running it as me generated error messages about not being able to write to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It came with no SU or SUDO style wrapper. It was not hard, and I probably could have dug up the name of the binary and launched it with SUDO and achieved the same thing.

So, in the few minutes I have had as a two headed Linux person, am I 30% more productive? I would say yes. The screen real estate allowing me to refer to things and “highlight and paste” from browser to email alone has made it worth it. The down side: My PCLOS box now has no monitor on it. Guest I'll have to dig up a CRT for it, at least till I configure VNC Server.