Enablling dual monitors on radeon

[jgrunhut]

Hi there,

 

I have a compaq pressario 2570 and would like to enable the built in tft and a separate crt to work at the same time ... not in clone mode.

 

Currently I am running man 10 newest kernel which ever that is and am using the built in radeon driver which comes with man 10. I haven't done anything special and it currently works in clone mode when the crt is plugged in, but I would like to have two separate desktops working if possible.

 

Any help is very appreciated.

 

Jason

[Praxis]

Wish I could offer words of advise. Mandriva 2009 has been a bear to get working with my Radeon 7000 dual VGA (works fine in Ubuntu Hardy). Part of it is probably Xorg 7.3, which I get the feeling is right up there with KDE 4 in terms of beta quality. I'm afraid the year before last may have been the year of the Linux desktop. Mandriva doesn't have a good tool set to deal with dual monitors (and with awilliamson gone, probably no one to help normal users in these forums). drakx11 is very limited in what it will let you do. The krandrtray implementation doesn't offer much help. as near as I can figure. Probably your best hope is to avoid Mandriva GUI tools altogether (but then what's the point of a newbie user friendly distro like Mandriva?) and look over the documentation at xorg itself. Play around with the xrandr commands.

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2

 

For myself, I'm just sick of wrestling with Mandriva every 6 months or a year to get a working system, so I think I'm going to blow away my Mandriva 2009 partitions on my two computers and install Debian stable.

[tux99]

For myself, I'm just sick of wrestling with Mandriva every 6 months or a year to get a working system, so I think I'm going to blow away my Mandriva 2009 partitions on my two computers and install Debian stable.

 

Who says you have to always upgrade to the latest version?

I'm still running mdv 2008.1 on my main desktop and I very much doubt I will upgrade to 2009.1 when that comes out, mdv 2008.1 still does all I need it to do and it still has got the best desktop environment: KDE 3.5!

(before I upgraded to 2008.1 I used mdk 9.2 for 4 years, I tested all the versions in between, but they all had some fatal flaws that made me stay with 9.2 until 2008.1).

 

Anyway with regards to the dual screen problem I might be able to help as I used to have a radeon 9200 with a dual screen setup and I still have the xorg.conf for it (it's for the ATI binary driver fglrx), I don't think it will work as-is for you, but it might be a starting point for you to adapt yours (make a backup copy of your current config file first!):

 

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier	  "Simple Layout"
	Screen		  0 "aticonfig-Screen[0]" 0 0
	Screen		  1 "aticonfig-Screen[1]" RightOf "aticonfig-Screen[0]"
	InputDevice	 "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
	InputDevice	 "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
	Option		  "Xinerama" "On"
EndSection

Section "Files"
	RgbPath		 "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
	FontPath		"unix/:-1"
	FontPath		"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
	FontPath		"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
	FontPath		"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo/"
	FontPath		"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
	FontPath		"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
	FontPath		"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/mdk/"
	FontPath		"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
	FontPath		"/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/encodings"
EndSection

Section "Module"
	SubSection "extmod"
			Option	  "omit xfree86-dga"   # don't initialise the DGA extension
	EndSubSection
	Load	"dbe"
	Load	"type1"
	Load	"speedo"
	Load	"freetype"
	Load	"glx"
	Load	"dri"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	  "Keyboard1"
	Driver		  "Keyboard"
	Option		  "XkbModel" "logiitc"
	Option		  "XkbLayout" "gb"
	Option		  "XkbRules" "xfree86"
	Option		  "AutoRepeat" "500 30"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	  "Mouse1"
	Driver		  "mouse"
	Option		  "Protocol" "MouseManPlusPS/2"
	Option		  "Device" "/dev/mouse"
	Option		  "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	  "aticonfig-Monitor[0]"
	Option		  "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier	  "aticonfig-Monitor[1]"
	Option		  "DPMS" "true"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier	  "aticonfig-Device[0]"
	Driver		  "fglrx"
	Option		  "ForceMonitors" "crt1,tmds1,notv"
	Option		  "VideoOverlay" "on"
	Option		  "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
	BusID		   "PCI:1:0:0"
	Screen		  0
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier	  "aticonfig-Device[1]"
	Driver		  "fglrx"
	BusID		   "PCI:1:0:0"
	Screen		  1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	  "aticonfig-Screen[0]"
	Device		  "aticonfig-Device[0]"
	Monitor		 "aticonfig-Monitor[0]"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
			Depth	 24
			Modes	"1280x1024"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier	  "aticonfig-Screen[1]"
	Device		  "aticonfig-Device[1]"
	Monitor		 "aticonfig-Monitor[1]"
	DefaultDepth	24
	SubSection "Display"
			Depth	 24
			Modes	"1280x1024"
	EndSubSection
EndSection

 

The sections of interest for you are: Screen (x2), Device (x2) and ServerLayout

Edited March 25, 2009 by tux99

[tux99]

Duh, just noticed the original post is 5 years old, Praxis is this some kind of practical joke or did you not realize it either?? :huh:

 

Whatever, I guess my ATI xorg.conf might still be of help to someone.

[Praxis]

Duh, just noticed the original post is 5 years old, Praxis is this some kind of practical joke or did you not realize it either?? :huh:

 

Whatever, I guess my ATI xorg.conf might still be of help to someone.

 

Nah, I didn't realize it either, I was just searching for posts about radeon dual monitor and didn't look too carefully at the date. Unfortunately I have a Radeon 7000 so the fglrx driver is out (actually, given what I read about fglrx that may not be so bad). So I'm falling back to hacking my xorg.conf and using xrandr commands.

 

I agree you don't have to always have the latest version, but support for Mandriva builds stops after 18 months, and upgrades from much older versions isn't supported. As the release notes for 2009 says, upgrade from 2007.1 isn't supported and if it breaks you get to keep both pieces. FWIW, this was a Mandriva 2006 install originally that I believe I've upgraded 3 times.

[tux99]

Nah, I didn't realize it either, I was just searching for posts about radeon dual monitor and didn't look too carefully at the date.

 

Oh well, it can happen to anyone ;)

 

I agree you don't have to always have the latest version, but support for Mandriva builds stops after 18 months, and upgrades from much older versions isn't supported. As the release notes for 2009 says, upgrade from 2007.1 isn't supported and if it breaks you get to keep both pieces. FWIW, this was a Mandriva 2006 install originally that I believe I've upgraded 3 times.

 

Well after the support (i.e. the security relevant updates) stops, I generally do it for myself (that's what I did last time with mdk 9.2), ultimately for a personal desktop machine all I care about is updating internet facing apps (like the browser), so it's not much hassle, as it's not that many packages.

 

And also having a supported distro doesn't necessarily mean being safe, just think of the openssl fiasco on debian...

 

With regards to distro upgrades, I generally don't do them, it's much less hassle to keep the home and data filesystems separate from the OS and just reinstall the OS. Ultimately it takes less time and you can be sure that no legacy config files cause unexpected problems, even if it means some things have to be reconfigured from scratch.

Even on a rolling distro like PCLinuxOS upgrades are often trouble, as far as I could tell by reading their forum for a while...

Edited March 25, 2009 by tux99