«
»

ubuntu, ATI and two monitors

October 8th, 2008
[ Linux ]

Working on an open source OS can be empowering. Most everything you’d like to do has a relatively simple solution with a common sense approach….IF you can find it. The challenge isn’t about having the freedom of possible solutions, it’s about being able to find, interpret, and judge a multitude of possible solutions in order to determine what the best solution is to a problem you’re experiencing.

A recent example? I’ve always ran 2 monitors on my desktop at home using an nVidia card which is notorious for offering better support to linux based systems. My new office desktop shipped with an ATI card. If you read enough, you could easily find yourself buying a new nVidia based card to solve this one. I strayed for a while on overly complex solutions, installing multiple packages from source etc, until finally landing on a one line solution.

“aticonfig –dtop=horizontal”

With that I have both monitors running beside each other as a single desktop. Simple but unusually complicated to find.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 8th, 2008 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://mouseclone.com Mouseclone

    This was easily solved by AMD drivers as well. Download the latest drivers and your set. The Catalyst program from AMD works fine for my dual monitor setup.

    One other thing to note though. It is recommended that you have the same size monitor for the second one. It was not easy to configure the second monitor to a different resolution with the Catalyst software. In fact, I think that it is next to impossible with the current software.

    If you do have 2 different size monitors, it might be better to use the Catalyst software to help get the xorg.conf file basically configured and then edit for the second monitor by hand.

  • brydon

    My office setup uses two identical monitors, however, at home I’m running two different manufacturers and sizes and was able to get it working with little effort.