[nzlug] Nvidia proprietary driver & multiple monitors in Ubuntu

[Toby Collett]

I had three monitors (actually two + tv output) for quite a while, but 
never without issues, possibly all avoidable?

My setup was two nvidia cards, a geforce4 mx440 (Im not a gamer, I only 
upgraded from my TNT2 to get dual head) and a geforce(or something like 
that) FX5200 PCI.

So, the issues I had.In many of the nvidia driver versions the 
combination of the two cards is unstable. happily runs for weeks or 
months and then wont boot for days...just when I think my PC is 
completely hosed, it all starts running again...Eventually I removed the 
PCI card and no issues since. There are known issues in combining 
differing nvidia chipsets. I didn't have the same problems running an 
SiS PCI video card, only problem was it was an 8MB card and it didn't 
support xv or hardware scaling so on my PIII-733 video playback could 
get a little nasty.

My second issue was getting twinview and xinerama to play nice. Twinview 
emulates xinerama info, but it seems the X server doesn't know what to 
do when you add an extra real screen in and it ignores the xinerama info 
from twinview (that means windows maximise across two desktops, popups 
bridge them etc. All able to be worked around, but annoying. If I 
switched off twinview and just used xinerama to link all three displays 
then hardware acceleration would break. This could all be fixed in the 
latest nvidia drivers, but I couldnt tell you, the geforce 4's are in no 
mands land, supported by versions after the 7xxx legacy drivers, but not 
supported by the latest ones.

On the plus side with nvidias display manager thing I can now switch my 
2nd monitor from CRT->TV at run time which has been a long time coming 
and somewhat eases the need for the third display in my case.

So to sum up: You should have no problems getting nvidia + two random 
PCI cards to display video (or at least no more than just getting two 
random PCI cards to work together), but you may have issues tweaking X 
settings to work just how you want. Of course this is my experience 
only, I'm sure others have many varied opinions.

Oh, and one last thought, if you have a decent dual head video card you 
could possibly get to 4 heads using one of these:
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/gxm/products/dh2go/home.php
never used one myself, but I was eyeing them up for some augmented 
reality work with laptops...

Toby

Howard wrote:
> Hi
>
> For a while now I've had a couple of monitors set up & working well on 
> my Ubuntu workstation using a dual head NVidia based card (AGP), and 
> the proprietary NVidia drivers (I highly recommend the Envy script for 
> easy setup).
>
> I have the bug for multiscreen and want one or two more heads...
>
> Before I go down a path of no return, will the NVidia tools/drivers 
> recognise other (or non-NVidia cards) say if I were to put one or two 
> PCI graphics cards in my workstation that I have lying around?
>
> I don't really need 3D (except google earth is a 'nice to have'...), 
> so could do it without the NVidia drivers if absolutely necessary to 
> get it to work.
>
> TIA
> Howard
>
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