Now Running Ubuntu….or not!
A week ago today I, almost to the minute I returned from lunch to find my (new) Dell XPS M1530 laptop (Vista) wouldn’t let me log in so i had to hard reset it, only to find it had suffered from a corrupt disc – a few hours later of running SpinRite I had a working system again. It’s ironic since Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery are in the same building, directly opposite us and people spend a fortune (£1k+ for data recovery) – they should try SpinRite. Anyhow, I digress.
You’d have thought that the period beep (and i mean beep) that my hard drive occasionally omitted, or the loud clunk too would have made me aware that my hard drive was definitely suspect – but no….so I logged a support call with Dell and on Monday morning had a new replacement drive sitting on my desk at 9am (great job guys!).
I’m been dabbling with Ubuntu, both as a WUBI installation and a partition prior to my drive failure so went ahead and installed 64 bit Ubuntu on the entire new disc, along with an XP VirtualBox machine. I soon had everything up and running, Evolution Mail work just fine with Exchange, Eclipse + Aptana plugin + CF Eclipse etc etc – but the one thing that meant I’m now back running Vista – dual screens. Either I missed something completely or dual screen support on Linux sucks – especially if your two screen differ in size (laptop is 1280×800, lcd is 1280×1024). I got it partially working using 2 X-Server sessions at the correct resolution but couldn’t drag windows between the sessions – did i miss something that would have just made it work as on Windows or is multi monitor support on Linux just naff?
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It does suck… BUT you can make it work. I run two screens at home – one an old 17″ CRT and the other a dell 22″ widescreen.
http://www.thecrumb.com/2008/01/22/ubuntu-nvidia-and-two-monitors/
Once you do get it to work – back up your xorg.conf file
This is kinda funny! Sounds exactly like my story. I bought a new Dell desktop w/Vista (mistake), reloaded with XP and had a HD failure a month later. After 1hr 45min w/Dell India support, I had a tech arrive the next day to replace the HD.
I’ve toyed with Linux over the years, but it was just never quite there. I tried the new Ubuntu Hardy, but have settled on Kubuntu. I don’t think I’m looking back this time. All my web dev tools work great in Kubuntu except for CF Report Builder.
My experience with dual monitors was extremely good. I have an Nvidia 8600. Using the restricted driver and nvidia-settings was painfully simple and it just works with my 17″ and 19″ LCDs using twinview. Even though it has worked well for me, I think this is one area that Windows really shines over linux.
I disagree with the description of twinview in the link that Jim provided. I use Twinview and it behaves exactly like Windows does. You can drag between monitors, maximize an app in each monitor etc and that is with different resolutions.
Don’t give up!
I’d agree, Linux dual monitor support sucks, but I just got lucky
I’ll have to go back and revisit that. My xorg.conf got trashed when I moved to Hardy so I set things back up using the latest drivers, etc.
I run two monitors, and it wasn’t that hard to setup at all.
I had to do some tweaking of the xorg.conf, but nothing major.
Since you have a dell XPS, I can assume you have an nVidia card.
Fire up the nVidia X Server settings (may need to run this in sudo mode, but don’t worry about it for now) – this is pretty much the best place to configure X with nVidia cards.
Click ‘Detect Displays’, and set the configuration of your monitors to ‘TwinView’.
You may actually be able to apply this straight away and have it work, if you are happy with it, save it to an X configuration file.
I needed to do some tweaking on that xorg.conf file, just to bring across some settings from my original, but the basics are there very easily.. but that was in Hardy, it may work better in Gutsy.