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Joined: Jan 10, 2009
Posts: 1
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Posted Jan 10, 2009 at 1:28:05 AM
Subject: Dual monitors
I'm having wicked problems getting a second monitor to work with my system, something that does work under Windows XP - so I know it's either a driver or configuration problem and not hardware related. Hardware - Motherboard is an Asus P5KPL-CM with 2 GB of RAM and a Q6600 processor. I'm using the built in VGA as the primary screen and I've been forced to change the BIOS setting to IDG so it boots on that screen. I'm flexible here and don't really care which monitor is plugged into which VGA card or which one is the primary. My other VGA card is GeForce 5500 FX which I know was a mistake to buy, but it was the cheapest PCI VGA card Fry's had that day and I was desperate to get my mother's machine to work. I've since replaced her whole computer and now I really want to get this POS to work in mine. OS - Well, I'm not particularly fussy, save I don't want Windows as the Host. This is going to be the Host OS for a Xen box and I really don't plan on spending much time in it, save doing Xen stuff. So I really care is that it supports XEN and has an easy way to do updates. My preference would be Ubuntu. Anyways, so far I've tried Ubuntu 8.10 and Kubuntu 8.10 and whatever the latest release of SUSE is. I've also spent a whole bunch of time messing with installing various nvidia drivers. No luck. The second screen is always dark. an [b]lspci[/b] shows both devices 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82G33/G31/P35/P31 Express DRAM Controller (rev 10) [b]00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 10)[/b] 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 01) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 01) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01) 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 01) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev e1) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GB/GR (ICH7 Family) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 01) 00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 01) 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (rev 01) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 01) 01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Attansic Technology Corp. L1 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev b0) [b]03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5500] (rev a1)[/b] I suspect this is mostly an issue with new XOrg 7.4 and it's magic xorg.conf file and the rotten state of nvidia drivers for linux. I did try over at Xorg, but never managed to get anyone to respond. I suppose I could back down to ubuntu 8.4, which I think uses Xorg 7.3 Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Rubberman
Joined Jul 30, 2007
Posts: 944
Location:40 miles west of Chicago

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Posted: Jan 10, 2009 4:11:30 AM
Subject: Dual monitors
Unfortunately, nVidia drivers do not support xen-enabled kernels. I had the same problem with the 8800GT board that I use with dual monitors. I dropped xen and went with Sun's VirtualBox for a VM manager. However, in my reading about nVidia and xen I found a couple of hacks which are supposed to enable their drivers to build a kernel module with xen, but I never tried that. Without xen, the newest nVidia drivers work great for me. I can run full-motion 720p video on both 1920x1200 panels (it helps to have 8 cores and lots of RAM! :-). That said, if full-motion video is not necessary, then use the VESA driver, which will work with dual monitors, I think... You may need to manually edit your xorg.conf file, depending upon the Linux system you are using. I am using CentOS 5.2 on my computer. The newer nVidia drivers will automatically configure your xorg.conf for you, at least so that it won't lose any current display configuration settings. I hope this helps somewhat.

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