Ubuntu Multimedia :: Shopping Video CardS For Multiple Monitors?
Aug 16, 2011
I'm about to start a new build for my primary machine at home. The plan is to load up a server/workstation motherboard (ASUS KGPE-D16) with two 8-core chip, as much RAM as it will take (32GB) and to put two graphics cards in it. One to power my main 24" monitor (ideally via HDMI) and the other card to power two screens, one 24" on each left and right side via DVI (unless I can find a dual-HDMI card that meets my needs).
Does that make sense? Here's my question for this awesome group of intelligent individuals: What video card model should I choose? Obviously, I'd like them to match so I can SLI / CrossFire if I really want to, but what setup should I plan on to have a good experience managing multiple displays on multiple video cards?
Oh, and budget is probably up to about $300 per card, maybe a little more if it makes a lot of sense.I'm not alone in having tons of problems with trying to get multi monitor support in the last few versions of Ubuntu, and honestly it's the only reason why I'm still running Windows7: the multi monitor support is just SO DAMNED easy! I shouldn't have to spend this much energy thinking about video card model- it should just work, shouldn't it?
I've been using linux for roughly 12 years now but I've always avoided linux on the desktop since touching X back in the day was quite a hassle. I recently decided that rather than keeping my windows desktop full of 15 PuTTY instances, I should rock the *nix desktop.
I started by installing Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop. It detected my two monitors handing off a pci express card just fine. I decided to install the ATI drivers when it prompted me - the proprietary drivers would let me select to use the monitors separately, but would always just default back to mirroring the screens. I was unable to get it to stop that, so I had to go back to the open source drivers. Which is fine, I don't really need the 3d accel. Roll forward a week, I ordered another video card to add another screen. I purchased another ATI card, since word on the street is that same-vendor chipsets play best together. This one had to be PCI, if this matters.
dmesg reports the new card is fine and happy, but the Monitors GUI thing doesn't detect any monitors off the new card, or report anything about it. So: what should I do to make the second video card get noticed?[URL]...
I was just wondering if is an easy way to configure three monitors run across two video cards (Nvidia Leadtek GTS250 PCI-E 2.0 1G 2DVI ) 2 on one, 1 on the other under the one xserver? I tried to get it going using the Nvidia driver package with no luck - 2 monitors seemed to be simple to configure using Twinview setting on a single xserver (my current settings) and I was hoping their may be a simple extension for three and if so is there an easy way to go about this? (I am new to Ubuntu).
Been looking around and have been trying for 4 days to get my 3 monitors to work with my 2 video cards , When the system starts up I get the bootup screens on the 3rd monitor , then the login box shows up on the 1st monitor and when logging out I see the shutdown screen on the 3rd monitor again , so I know ubuntu see's it , but not sure how to include it in the regular desktop . It's just a lighted very dark red and I can't move my mouse or any windows over to it , here is my xorg.conf that I modified and tried to get it to work with :
# nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings # nvidia-settings: version 260.19.06 (buildd@palmer) Mon Oct 4 16:01:38 UTC 2010 Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "Layout0"
I'm trying to get ubuntu working w/ 3 monitors. I have been given 2 video cards
lspci | grep VGA 20:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV620 LE [Radeon HD 3450] 25:05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV44A [GeForce 6200] (rev a1)
I have had it working w/ two monitors plugged into the ATI correctly. and the nVidia monitor blank. Now I have the nVidia monitor working and one monitor from the ATI working, but I can't seem to get the last monitor to show anything. It does show the boot screen and works up until the point you are presented w/ the login screen for ubuntu, then it disappears and the nVidia monitor turns on. Might I have something wrong w/ my xorg.conf or do I need to do something more to get this to work? Currently I'm seeing this error in my Xorg.0.log file, but I'm not sure where to go from here:
[ 24.746] (EE) RADEON(2): reusing fd for second head /etc/X11/xorg.conf # nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig # nvidia-xconfig: version 270.29 (buildmeister@swio-display-x86-rhel47-02.nvid
Is there a simple way to have both of the monitors on a system enabled? The video cards are both older ATI cards. One is a Radeon 9000 AGP 64MB, and the other is quite a bit older (ATI 3D Rage Pro 2x). When Ubuntu 10.10 is booting up, the splash screen appears nicely on the left-side monitor, and then the final desktop appears on the right-side monitor, but when I go to system --> preferences --> monitors, only one monitor is available. I'm guessing the right monitor is fed by the Radeon (I can check if it matters). If the splash screen appears on the left side when booting, why isn't that display available after the bootup has completed?
As described in further detail below I am looking for some help in Ubuntu 10.10 with a multi-monitor + multi-gpu setup using both ATI and Nvidia video cards installed within the same system (que scoffs and jeers). Is it possible to sucessfully run both ATI and NVidia GPU's and Drivers simultaneously in Ubuntu 10.10 (think multi-monitor environment)? I am asking b/c I am having trouble figuring out how to manage my video cards - particularly ATI - within a multi-monitor + multi-gpu video card environment.
Here's the setup:
Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat x2 - NVidia 6800XT SLi GPU's + 2 DVI outputs/per card (Serviceable card for my needs) x1 - ATI Rage XL PCI Card + 1 VGA output (Yes, ancient hardware...I know)
After working on trying to get my 3 monitors to work with Ubuntu 10.4 and my ATI Radeon HD3200 (IGP) and HD4850 cards, I just had to share the xorg.conf. I am using the default open source drivers that came with 10.4 and I kept KMS enabled (it wouldn't work without it).
I have 2 ATI cards that I used to use on windows to run 4 monitors. A recurring problem has been to get them detected in linux. Only my secondary card is picked up linux. When I manage the displays it detects the 2 monitors connected that card.
What are the specific steps I should take to get the second card detected? Supposedly there is a tool system-config-xfree. I don't have it, yum can't find it.
Also I heard it has something to do with editing some xorg.conf file or something to that effect. I have absolutely no idea how to find the "bus id" of my card, or lookup the horizontal refresh rates, etc..
I would probably have no problem following the documentation & editing the file if I knew a good way to find these values.
Someone also suggested installing linux twice and saving the xorg.conf it generates each time (with different card each time) and then merging the two by hand. That is like killing a fly with a hammer though, when I do this again and again in the future It'd be nice to not have to take twice as long.
In Ubuntu Lucid Lynx RC, I got NVidia's TwinView to work with 2 monitors in a single video card. But when I use the same monitors but split them between the video cards I can't make TwinView work and it starts a X server for each monitor. I want the same effect I had with one video card.
I'm using a NVIDIA 9600M GT on my laptop running Ubuntu 10.10. The laptop has a 16:10 display, I also connected my 16:9 LCD TV via HDMI. I would like to use them as clones. The problem is, as my TV has a different aspect ratio than my laptop display, the image does not fully fit on the TV. For example, when using a resolution of 1280x800 (16:10), one tenth of the width of that image is missing on my TV, as it has an aspect ratio of 16:9.
In Windows, the NVIDIA software stretches the image so that it appears a little distorted on my TV, but at least I see everything. Is it possible to do that in Ubuntu?
I'm having some trouble hooking my external flatscreen monitor up to my Toshiba Tecra's docking station and having Mint (or Debian) be happy with it. The laptop uses a widescreen monitor but my external is a 4x3; I wonder if this is causing problems. Of course, it may just be the Intel 82801G graphics adapter.et things up properly in the Display Preferences config window (I'm using Gnome, btw) but when I hit apply, the system locks and I have to hard boot. I've never set up a linux box with multiple monitors before, let alone multiple monitors that require different resolutions.
I've browsed the internet, but haven't found a satisfying answer. Hope this forum can help me in the right direction.I'm exploring the possibilities of creating a program that manipulates (writes to) two different video cards.I program in C and hope to avoid high level libraries like Xlib to keep the mem footprint as low and the performance as high as possible. Windowing is not important no desktop environment will be used. Be able to write two pixels (one to each screen) to would do.
How would I go about?To give an idea of the solution I'm looking for:One screen will show thumbnails of images on the hard drive. Clicking an thumbnail on display A will show the selection full screen on display B. On a laptop; preferably thumbnails on the laptop screen and the selected image on the external monitor.Is this possible with just low-level libs or do I need X or some third-party software to make life easy?
I recently upgraded to Lucid from Karmic and shortly before the release upgraded from a geforce 8400gs to my geforce GT240 and noticed no difference on Karmic. I read somewhere that the capability of video cards would be applied further with Lucid. Since installing Lucid I've noticed a severely reduced sharpness and severely increased contrast, changing the contrast in X server has no effect. My hardware driver is activated but not in use and no online fix I've attempted has been successful in resolving the issue. Is it possible to use a gt240 on lucid with no hassle and is there any way I can maximize my video cards capabilities?
I have a Nvidia graphics card, and an onboard card. I wanted to use both concurrently. At first I was only getting signal from the Nvidia one, but I want both. I changed the settings in my BIOS to Onboard, but it is now only coming from my onboard one. I then installed the Nvidia drivers from Additional Drivers, and then boot hung on checking battery state. I had to remove info from xorg.conf just to boot.
Both cards have monitors plugged into their VGA ports, but only one of the monitors shows a display. The other monitor goes into power saver mode right after start up. Nvidia X Server settings only shows a single graphics card (the 8200) and a single monitor (detect monitor finds nothing). Going through Prefences: Monitors also only shows a single monitor and doesn't detect a thing when detect monitors is clicked.
Monitor one has 1440 x 900 resolution and I'm not sure what the resolution of Monitor two is supposed to be, but it displays rather nicely at being set to 1440 x 900.
Both graphics cards are detected and usable in Vista, but a quick switch of the plugs shows that only the 8200 is registering in Ubuntu.
Ideally I want to have a dual monitor set up, with one screen showing documents or pictures with the other using Gimp or Blender.
I've seen several threads in Ubuntu regarding implementing vaapi/xvba enabled media players for ATI GPU rendering. Does anyone know of any precompiled rpms for 11.3 (or tips for building on opensuse). I've installed Hellgasts xvba-video-amd rpms from the build service. I wasn't able to successfully build my own mplayer-vaapi from Index of /~gbeauchesne/mplayer-vaapi.
Edit: FIXED, see 2nd 1/2 for correct config...Id like for someone to look over my xorg.conf and tell me what I'm doing wrong. Just a bit of background I'm using an Matrox G450 Multihead and a Nvidia MX4000 and have three monitors. Id like the G450 multi head to fire on the far left and far right and the nvidia to run in the center. The desktop should be extended across all three.
I have an ACER Veriton 7600GT, with an internal Intel 82865G, which drives the main monitor and a Radeon 9250 which drives a second monitor (on its first port) - it all works fine under XP.I've had no luck at all trying to get any version of linux to cope with this. I've been trying live cds..PCLinuxOS and Mandriva will not boot except in 'safe mode' and then run with the wrong resolution for the main monitor and ignore the second one.
Ubuntu boots OK for primary but ignores the second monitor (I'm not keen on ubuntu anyway because of instability on other machines).OpenSUSE boots OK for primary and seemed to offer some hope of setting up the second monitor. However, after this discussion it seems to have come down to trying the latest development milestone.There is quite a lot of diagnostics in the above discussion and I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience of this sort of thing? The problem seems very fundamental in the sense that (even with all the tests) I've never seen the second monitor even receive a signal and wake up under any version of linux.
I have 2 nvidia gfx cards, if I use the nvidia settings tool to view 2 monitors with the same gfx card works fine, when i use one gfx card for one monitor and the other gfx card for the other monitor X doesnt start and just cycles through monitor flashes.
I've got an ACER Veriton 7600GT, with an internal Intel 82865G, which drives the main monitor and a Radeon 9250 which drives a second monitor (on its first port).The configuration seems to kill many live cds but not opensuse - that's the good news. The bad news is that, if I've understood this; Configuring graphics cards/Dual Head Mode - openSUSE, it should be detected and started in clone mode - it isn't. Running sax2 doesn't help (and that's the first thing in the XRandR instructions too. I've yet to see my second monitor so much as flicker. I would like to see this working on the live cd before I commit to installing opensuse.
I'm starting to have A LOT of opened windows in my machine. Sometimes within a project, I have e-mail/task management/personal e-mail/twitter, and a lot of different opened applications/terminals in my Linux workstation.Sometimes it would be interesting to have different workspaces to projects instead of this configuration I have nowadays that are classes of work (bad name, I know, but I think you got the idea).I'm starting to think about using two monitors: one with Corporate Management, Work and Personal. The second monitor is only the development state: each workspace here is about a project being worked on instead of groups of works like before. A workspace may be implementing different classes for example.
My question is: I just want to change to a second monitor using the mouse. I want to still be able to change workspaces in the same monitor using keyboard shortcuts. The keyboard shortcuts wouldn't change monitors, just worskpaces on the same monitor. All the tutorials I read (like this one) only tells how to use multiple monitors but doesn't answer my question about keyboard shortcuts.Does Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx or Debian 5.0.5 Lenny) support this envisioned setup (Different workspaces in a way that keyboard workspace switching only works in the current monitor) ? If so, how?I haven't tested this setup, that's why I'm asking. In this question the user says it works exactly how I want it to behave, can someone else confirm it?
So essentially, I have 3 monitors and i'm attempting to run 2 different window managers/sessions at once split up on the monitors. It is intended to be like this:
Code: [GNOME/Compiz - Screen0] - Left Monitor[code]......
I am trying to resolve an ongoing fight involving /dev/video node assignment between 2 TV Tuner cards and a USB video camera.
Each time I reboot the three devices seem to shuffle their /dev/video assignment. i.e. what was /dev/video0 (USB camera) after a reboot magically becomes /dev/video1.
This causes all kinds of grief between my MythBackend and ZoneMinder who expect the devices to have static assignments.
how to best solve this? I did a brief search and one solution appears to be to statically assign the devices.
I am trying to record streaming flash video to multiple files each limiting upto 10 mins.Thinking of two possible ways to script,1) saving the files with 10 minute time limit on the fly as I record2) record the whole video as single file and split into multiple files with time limit.
I have two video files (Xvid) and would like to combine the video from one of these with the audio track of the other, in order to create a new video file.
This is somewhat complicated by the fact that I would like the resulting audio to be a mixture of the two original audio tracks, for instance, during some time segments, I would like to switch from one to the other, but the video should always be the same.
Another issue that complicates the things is that the two audio tracks have different bit rates, and when I briefly managed to merge the two, one of the audio tracks was playing much faster than the other. To clarify, the audio tracks should not overlap but just be played at the different time during the video playback.
I am trying to do this by using Audacity. The problem is that I am fairly new to Audacity and I have not been able to find any info in their user guides regarding this specific issue.
Code: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO] (rev 01) 01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO] (Secondary) (rev 01) 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03) 04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Mobility Radeon HD 3600 Series Initially I had just teh HD 3600 in the PC, using the "AMDccle" drivers and configuration running two monitors.
I then added an old RV280 PCI card to allow a third monitor. When the PC powers on the bios output is on the RV280, once linux starts the RV280 monitor goes to the ubuntu desktop colour, the two monitors on the HD3600 get a signal (power up) and display the logon screen.
When I log on the two HD3600 screens become my desktop. If I ctrl alt f1 etc. the terminal screen comes up on the RV280 and the two HD3600 screens go blank. This suggests that all 3 monitors/ 2 graphics cards are all working ok, and ubuntu is happy with them. My problem now is to make the RV280 accessable via X/gnome at the same time as the HD3600. It would be nice to have it as a 3rd monitor on a very wide desktop, but I'd settle for it being its own little window running various tasks/programs such as mail/firefox.
I use Kubuntu 10.04. I want to use multiple monitors in an extended way. When i connect a monitor to my laptop, i get the same desktop view on both monitors. When i go to system settings - display - multiple monitors, i see the message: "This module is only for configuring systems with a single desktop spread across multiple monitors. You do not appear to have this configuration".
I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 x64 as a guest in VirtualBox on top of Windows 7. I recently bought a second monitor, and I want to set up my Ubuntu guest to use both monitors. I configured VirtualBox to give two displays to the VM, and two windows are displayed when I run the VM, however, the Ubuntu guest only uses the primary screen and does nothing with the second--the second screen is just black.
When I go to the monitor settings, only the one monitor is detected (as an "unknown monitor") I have the latest guest additions installed and the driver under System-Administration->Additional Drivers is shown as installed and working correctly. I don't have any issues with the single display--it shows in the correct resolution, and works fine if I set it to fullscreen or seamless mode. Any thoughts on getting Ubuntu to detect the other screen?
