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Fedora 10 Dual Monitor Woes
Mon, 04/20/2009 - 23:07 — dgoodwin
New video card arrived today, an ATI Radeon HD 3650 with two DVI ports, but it's been quite a bit of trouble getting a fluid dual monitor setup working. I think most of the issues are related to my use of two different monitors, one a standard LCD capable of 1600x1200 and the other a widescreen LCD capable of 1680x1050.
Out of the box I think mirroring worked at a common resolution as is expected, but gnome-display-properties wouldn't do much for me without an xorg.conf in place so I had to generate one and then hack it up a bit. At some point this afternoon I had both displays in their native resolution, though on the "shorter" of the two the mouse would technically go off screen above or below (depending on how I had them arranged in gnome-display-properties), although the gnome panels displayed in the correct location. (which wasn't bad)
Somewhere along the way I broke that and haven't been able to get it back, at the end of the day I have dual head working, just with the secondary monitor at a sub-optimal resolution. (which also isn't terrible) If I try to take them both up to max, the widescreen one (my primary) says it can't display the resolution it's being given.
Things are relatively buggy even when it's working, it's pretty easy to get gnome-display-properties (which I think is just making calls to xrandr) pretty messed up and you need to kill X to get it back to working. Opening the Appearance window in GNOME tends to send my fonts all wonky. Windows seem to open on either display quite randomly, though there might be some logic to it I haven't realized yet.
I'm using the radeon xorg driver, I see there's also a radeonhd driver available as well as the fglrx proprietary driver, anyone know if it's worth trying the others?
Sadly I now see the display I was using is brutally washed out when it's sitting next to a newer one. It was a refurb replacement for a monitor I bought in 2005 so it's seen a lot of action. The video card also has a fan which unfortunately has added a substantial amount of noise to my system, might be time to relocate it beneath the desk to drown it out a bit.
Things look a little more promising for F11 with new xorg and xrandr code, though I suspect I'm not done playing with combinations on F10 yet. Any advice would be much appreciated.
EDIT: As soon as I submitted I switched to the radeonhd open source driver and immediately could get my full resolutions back that I had this afternoon.
ANOTHER EDIT: Turns out what I thought was the GNOME Appearance dialog messing with the resolution was actually just fonts suddenly getting much larger. It almost seems like before opening the dialog, fonts are not what I have set in GNOME but rather something I've never seen before. As soon as the dialog is opened they get huge but just because my font settings now appear that way. I scaled them down and it looks normal and is under my control, I guess I just need to open the dialog every login. Hard to get settings that look right on both monitors but it's bearable.
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"
FontPath "catalogue:/etc/X11/fontpath.d"
FontPath "built-ins"
EndSection
Section "Module"
Load "glx"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "dri"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
#DisplaySize 470 300 # mm
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "DEL"
ModelName "DELL E228WFP"
HorizSync 30.0 - 83.0
VertRefresh 56.0 - 75.0
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor1"
VendorName "DEL"
ModelName "DELL 2005FP"
HorizSync 28.0 - 84.0
VertRefresh 43.0 - 60.0
Option "DPMS"
Option "LeftOf" "Monitor0"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "radeonhd"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Mobility Radeon HD 3600 Series"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Screen 0
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Card1"
Driver "radeonhd"
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "Mobility Radeon HD 3600 Series"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Screen 1
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1680x1050" "1400x1050"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen1"
Device "Card1"
Monitor "Monitor1"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200" "1024x768"
EndSubSection
EndSection(c) 2009 rm-rf.ca
Comments
I know this doesn't help, but
I know this doesn't help, but I've had really good luck with nvidia's "Twinview" features in their driver. A few years ago when I was using fvwm and xinerama for dual monitors, twinview ran a *ton* faster. It also handled different resolutions pretty well.
I hit some weirdness with it since the card has one DVI and one VGA port (it's a bit of a ghetto dual monitor solution, the card is old as hell). The driver wants to give preference to the VGA one, but natch I want the preference on the DVI one. So my Gnome menus are on my "side" monitor, which I've grown very accustomed to (these days Gnome Do has replaced my menu usage almost completely).
I'm curious to hear how you like the ATI drivers after using them for some time. Between twinview and the (so far) painless installation of the nvidia drivers, I've been pretty pro-nvidia as far as Linux goes. It will be good to hear some experiences with ATI.
I'm hoping ATI will work out
I'm hoping ATI will work out ok. I remember a year or so ago they announced they were going to go open source with their drivers and I assume these drivers are the work that's been done for that so far.
I was using nvidia for years before, the binary drivers were usually a complete pain if you ran any pre-release stuff which always bothered me, and they weren't in stock Fedora, but that's gotten much better with recent releases and rpmfusion. Once installed I too had pretty good experiences with Nvidia just never in dual head configuration.
Fingers crossed that ATI works out ok. :)
My motherboard comes with Intel integrated graphics, if that wasn't VGA only I think I'd have stuck with that. :) Sure is nice to have the drivers right there in the stock distribution.
Hi there, I dont know if I am
Hi there, I dont know if I am writing in a proper board but I have got a problem with activation, link i receive in email is not working... http://rm-rf.ca/?fe8f9c28f32f12409d6d8bf5d71,
You are really doing it the
You are really doing it the hardway... with F10 and F11 I use this config for dual head on my ATI 3650 card..
Works perfectly and you don't have to mess with pci ids at all...
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "Files"
EndSection
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AIGLX" "on"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105+inet"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "DVI-1"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "DVI-0"
Option "RightOf" "DVI-1"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "ati"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Virtual 4096 1280
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "Extensions"
Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection
That's interesting. Unless
That's interesting. Unless I'm misreading it, the video card is only declared once. I've typically seen it how Devan has it, with it defined as two devices.
I prefer to leave my
I prefer to leave my xorg.conf empty (except maybe for a single device entry if i want to test out radeonhd, but usually radeon is just fine for me) and then just use a couple xrandr commands on desktop startup to position the monitors, i.e "xrandr --output LVDS --left-of DVI-0"
I've tried for ages and ages
I've tried for ages and ages to get two monitors at different resolutions working with my HD3200. The best I had it was two separate desktops with each monitor at its own resolution, however that meant that I couldn't drag windows between them (this was F8).
I have had limited success with F10, managing to get it so that the monitor with the lower resolution shows just part of its share of desktop.
I don't really like this (it means you can't see the window close button or you can't see the task bar grrrrr) so I have ended up turning off my second monitor and now it just sits there.
All the documentation I have seen is mental, and loads of it is irrelevant or out of date. Everyone has their own xorg.conf that they swear works but it seems to be totally random.
I've tried all sorts of drivers and config tools (ati's one and fedora's one - ati's makes my system die if I turn on xinerama and I have to enter rescue mode to wipe out the xorg.conf). Options in most gui tools tend to be greyed out or do nothing with no explanation - adding to the frustration.
There have been lots of fun bugs like the mouse getting trapped in the one monitor without the menus etc, a lot of blank screens with no option to get to a command line :( At one point my screen rotated by 90 degrees in only one user account, which I spent ages wiping out random gnome configuration ahhhhh.
It seems like most Fedora dual screen users know far more than they _ever_ wanted to know about xorg.conf etc and success is very still limited. The people who I have seen get it working become too scared to change anything in case it breaks again.
/rant
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