A Dual Headed Configuration
Last month, I purchased 2 nice black Planar 17" LCD's with
DVI inputs. They also feature 450:1 contrast and 16ms refresh
making them one of the better models out there. Reviews were
quite good so I jumped at the Dell offer. Apparently there was
either a pricing mistake or typo but for $300 each I could wait.
After a month they arrived. I then ordered a ASUS V9280, GeForce
4 Ti4200 AGP 8x card. It offers dual DVI outputs to drive my
dual lcd's.
The overall effect is quite nice but two monitors can lead to
physical layout issues. I find the inner seam centered in front
of me and it seems to be a touch distracting so far. 3 screens
would offer a superior view but would leave no desktop space.
Another option is to center one screen and have the other to the
left or right. I've got a larger pair of desktop speakers, Monsoons,
which also causes issues. So far having the monitors side by side
with the speakers at each end works best.
I'm using the latest NVidia driver with FreeBSD 4.9.
My windowmanager is windowmaker v 0.80.1.
At first I had the system configured in such a way that wmaker
actually spawned a desktop on each monitor. This works okay but
certain applications would never start on the 2nd monitor wm
(for example : fxtv) and I was unable to drag apps from one
desktop to another. Workspaces were still functional though.
I didn't spend much time with this setup so I did not work on
disabling the Dock and Fiend in the 2nd workspace.
Next up I decided to work with NVidia TwinView functionality.
While the 1st setup would work for game play overall the
stretched workspace is probably better.
My config looks like this currently
(trimmed down)
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "AGP NVidia"
Screen "Screen0"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Option "TwinView" "ON"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-70"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50-160"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024; 1024x768,1024x768"
# Option "ConnectedMonitor" "LCD,LCD"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP,DFP"
Identifier "NV AGP TwinView"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVidia"
Card "GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "NV AGP Twinview"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 16
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1280x1024"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection
# Section "ServerFlags"
# Option "Xinerama" "true"
# EndSection
UPDATE: 11 Dec 2003
Props go out to Dave for RTFMing and determing that my config above
is a bit off. The ServerFlags section is not needed IF you are using
the nvidia driver. Apparently the nvidia driver does this auto- magically.
Also the correct values for ConnectedMonitor are CRT or DFP.
Copyright © 2003,2004 - Steven St.Laurent - steven@403forbidden.net