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Multiple Monitors for Linux Laptops? 37

Posted by michael from the double-the-pleasure dept.
dybvandal writes "Multi monitoring support for laptops is far is from perfect in the windows world even though it enhances productivty considerably and letting that laptop TFT go to waste while using an external monitor is also a shame. I found no support in Win2K and only limited support under WinXP (laptop tft is forced to be primary). Win9x actually does multi monitoring perfectly but it can hardly be considered a productive environment. But since my company is making the switch to Linux soon I was hoping that this episode would soon end. But according to the xfree page multi monitor support is still fairly limited in general and with no comments on laptops. There seem to be commercial alternatives (xig, metro-X) but I would like to hear about some first hand success stories before spending the cash on such a solution."
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Multiple Monitors for Linux Laptops? More

Multiple Monitors for Linux Laptops?

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  • NVIDIA TwinView (Score:4, Informative)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Sunday March 24, 2002 @10:57AM (#3215956) Homepage
    Nvidia's linux drivers have support for twinview in them: their multimonitor technology. I'm somewhat sure that their mobile GPUs have TwinView enabled.

    The linux drivers support using an external monitor or television as your second display.
    • I have a laptop with a GeForce2 Go in it. It has TwinView support right out of the box. Plug a monitor into the port on the back, or plug a TV into the SVideo out and the drivers will enable TwinView for you. The laptop display becomes the primary, and the external becomes the secondary. It works seamlessly with Windows 2K and XP. I haven't tried Linux on it.
    • We have them running Linux here and it works great. Took a couple tweaks.
  • As far as I know, laptops that can connect an external monitor have graphic chipsets that support two outputs, but the outputs come from the same framebuffer, therefore both show the same picture.

    One thing would be to get a PCMCIA graphic card (expensive, in the $400 range last I've seen) or have a laptop with a PCI slot (I've never seen those).

    XFree86 does support XINERAMA which takes two framebuffers and makes a single desktop out of them.
    • I've got a ATI M4 chip in my Dell that can support two different outputs at the same time. Occasionally I've used it with an external monitor to get a 3200x1200 sized screen with Windows 2000. I'm pretty sure the nVidia chips can also do dualhead.

      Not tried dualhead under Linux though so I can't comment on if it's supported.
      • this is interesting ... the M4 has multi monitor support under win2k. i actually found contradicting stuff in the win2k help files if the feature is supported at all. since none of the two laptops i tried worked (trident cyberblade and ati M1) i assumed that it just does not work under win2k. well this paints a better picture for WinNT based OS's. Now the question is if Linux can top this :-)
    • or have a laptop with a PCI slot (I've never seen those).

      Maybe not built-in but some port replicators have PCI slots in them. I have one for an older Sager laptop with 3 slots. I've used it for external SCSI, multiple NICs, etc. It made a cool little firewall when I needed a temporary one. I should grab a couple of PCI video cards and see what I can come up with. Sounds like fun.

  • macOSX on a PBG3/G4 (-1 offtopic/troll/flamebait ) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by spike666 ( 170947 ) on Sunday March 24, 2002 @12:04PM (#3216061) Journal
    ok, ok, ok, i know this is not what you asked, but macOSX does support out of the box, multiple monitors. BUT the hardware must also. for instance, the iBook does not allow you to have separate video between your vga and lcd. Powerbooks do. i'm on a Powerbook G3 and if i walk over to my desk and plug in my 17" monitor, i can dual monitor it. (this has been a hallmark of mac powerbooks since the powerbook 520/540)
    i wish the iBook would also, but as a "consumer" line apple didnt think the extra monitor needed to be anything other than mirrored.
    (hmm, i wonder if i jack in my tv via the svideo and my monitor if i can have THREE monitors... where's a long rca cord...)

    oh um, i dunno if the various PPCLinuxes support dual monitor mode. i would imagine they do.
    • ok. i would like to know how this is -1 offtopic/troll/flamebait.. sure it's not linux, but it is unix.. hell.. half the other posts are about windblows anyways.. and the osX one gets this???.. OSX works awesome for this.. plug it in and go.. simple as that.. in my experience (on a tiBook) this was a painless process.. it worked right away on a sun monitor.. took it over to a projector.. and hey.. it worked perfectly.. just like that..

      ok.. so it's not linux.. with xcinerama this should be easy to do.. so grab xfree86 4.2 and play with it..

      are all the moderators on crack??

  • Depends on the graphics chipset (Score:3, Informative)

    by ShmuelP ( 5675 ) on Sunday March 24, 2002 @03:03PM (#3216644)
    It depends on the xinerama support for the chipset. For my ATI Rage128 Mobility, there is no support, though I think that other chipsets fare better. Check www.xfree86.org [xfree86.org] and http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Xinerama-HOWTO.html [linuxdoc.org].
  • Win9x actually does multi monitoring perfectly but it can hardly be considered a productive environment.

    It's as productive as W2K as long as you don't need IIS or SQL Server on the local machine and as long as you treat it with respect.
  • I have a Dell 8100 with the Nvidia GeForce2Go video card. With only about 30 minutes' work in the XFree86 configuration files (not too bad, but not for beginners either) I was able to get it to use an external monitor along with the built-in display. It works beautifully, with a few caveats:
    (1) The built-in display is the secondary display when an external one is connected, so you have to have two different XFree86 config files, one for multi-display and one for single display.
    (2) If the two are at different resolutions, then there is dead space around the display with the lower resolution; it's possible to lose the mouse or boxes in the dead space.
    (3) Nvidia are assholes and refuse to release the source for their drivers. So you have binary-only drivers and have to reinstall them every time you upgrade your kernel. Of course, this is a GeForce-wide problem and not limited to use of two monitors...

    If you can cope with this, the TwinView solution works fine.

    Good Luck!
    • well I would actually prefer to have the laptop TFT to be secondary, because my CRT monitor is much bigger ... but choice would be nice (especially if you have the 16" sony laptop)

  • huh? windows works great (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Splork ( 13498 ) on Sunday March 24, 2002 @09:43PM (#3218245) Homepage
    windows 98, me, 2000 and XP all have great multiple monitor support when using more than one video card or using a video card with multi-head outputs (ATI and Matrox make good ones).

    XFree86's multihead support works well, but it not easy to setup and not quite as nice to use. And X doesn't support multi-head in the nice friendly same screen (ie: windows can be dragged between screens) format without applications popping up thinking that its one large display so that the show up across multiple heads or with dialog boxed centered on the break in your monitors.
    • windows 98, me, 2000 and XP all have great multiple monitor support when using more than one video card or using a video card with multi-head outputs (ATI and Matrox make good ones).

      IF your vendor has supplied drivers, and that's a big IF. ATI, for example, has not supplied dual monitor capable drivers for Windows 2000 for the M1 card. Keep in mind that although older, this card is still used in currently shipping systems!

      Yet no love from ATI. They suck.

    • for the record, he asked about laptops... now, it may seem quite obvious to me, but maybe it's not so obvious.... it is not possible to install another video card on a laptop...

      one other thing... ATI's drivers for win2k are a tad bit shady when dealing with dual monitors.... my ATI Rage Pro 2x AGP will only run "Mirror" in win2k, while it will do regular multi-monitors just fine in 98

      Somewhere I was told that win2k doesn't support regular multiple monitors, but as I own a radeon VE, I know that's entirely untrue

    • And X doesn't support multi-head in the nice friendly same screen (ie: windows can be dragged between screens) format without applications popping up thinking that its one large display so that the show up across multiple heads or with dialog boxed centered on the break in your monitors.

      Incorrect - it's dependant on the window manager. KDE supports proper dialogue centering, maximizes windows to just the current screen, launches windows on the head that the mouse pointer is on without going into other screens, and also allows you to snap to the edge of the screen, and if you drag a bit more, it slides it over to the other screen (all of these fatures are, of course, available to non-KDE apps when launched under KDE). In addition, most KDE apps that run in full screen (like image viewers) will use the center head, with only video (in 2.x, it's dependant on libmpeg) having some issues (libmpeg has problems with getting the aspect ratio when called inside KDE - I use MPlayer anyway).

      It's a big reason why I use KDE - just about everything is very multihead aware. I filed a whole slew of bug reports when 2.x first came out, and they've all been pretty much addressed. At the recent KDE Coding conference there was apparantly a whole bunch of work done to add even more multihead specific features as well as careful testing of KDE 3.0 beta on a multihead system.

      --
      Evan

      • thanks, that's good to know. i'm looking forward to kde 3.0's release. I will play with Xinerama mode again once it is out.

        Though still not sure Xinerama can do what i want. I have a 1600x1200 crt with a 1024x768 lcd beside it. I don't want stupid "scroll the viewing window at the edge of the screen" behavior on the lcd.
        • Last I checked, the xinerama has to be rectangular. You won't scroll the screen itself (that annoys me as well), but the mouse will slide off the top of the screen and can wander around in nonvisible desktop. X reports the desktop with a height and width - it's kinda hard to return an complicated polygon with two values.

          --
          Evan

  • OS X? (Score:2)

    by Perdo ( 151843 )
    Have anyone looked at OS X's multiple display features? OS 9 was great and I would hate to think Apple would drop the ball after getting it right, better than any othe implementation I've seen.
  • Back in 1999 I bought a Toshiba laptop with an S3 chipset. You could run dual monitors under Windows 98 with it. You could have them display the same image, or you could have 2 different screens. But, the system only had something like 4 MB of video RAM so you could run 800x600 on the laptop LCD, and then only up to 1024x768 on the external monitor.
  • Funny, I use XP on a laptop, and my 21in external monitor is my primary display.

    If your video driver supports it, go to "Display Properties", "Settings", "Advanced" and there will generally be a multiple monitors tab. (named different depending on the vendor) You can use radio buttons on the ATI drivers to switch which is primary.

    ATI and NVIDIA chipsets both support this, but your particular drivers may not. I load the ATI drivers from Dell on my Gateway and it works fine.
    • well this particular problem was on the trident cyberblade but its seems like the windows help files are just really contradicting themselves and the different support from vendors for the various windows OSs makes it even more confusing it seems like in terms of dual monitoring there are chipsets that work well under winNT/2k/xp but alot dont

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