Dual Monitors Ubuntu Jaunty

[Craig White]

Hi -

On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 20:27 -0700, Joseph Sinclair wrote:
> Most cards have a maximum resolution for all screens combined (for instance, an ATI 200M maxes out at 2048x1536) which is based on how fast it can push pixels across the (DVI/HDMI/RAMDAC) interface.
> I would be surprised if you actually cannot exceed 1024x768 for a single screen, but getting multi-monitor support working well is a bit of a black-art still, and the combined max resolution of your card may be too small to handle the laptop screen and a large screen besides.
> 
> If you can let us know what card you're working with, it's fairly easy to google the specs to find it's (official) limits.
> 
> The thing you may have to do is use the appropriate configuration subsystem to add more resolution options to the system.  I've found xrandr in the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases to be very poor at correctly configuring displays, even though the only purpose it has is to make that work better...
> 
> 
> Mike Hoy wrote:
> > I set up Juanty on my laptop and decided to hook up my 22" monitor
> > (widescreen). It's nice to have a larger viewing area but the screen
> > resolution for the 22" monitor is exactly the same as the laptop 1024x768.
> > I'm not that well educated on screen resolutions and video cards/drivers so
> > I have to ask: Is there a maximum screen resolution that a video card will
> > support or can I force it to a different resolution for the 22" monitor?
> > 
> > In windows the laptop maxes out at 1024x768 so that alone is telling me that
> > the card cannot do any higher. Any help appreciated.
----
I cannot comment on the current state of Ubuntu. I think that Fedora is
shipping a newer version of xserver and xrandr (1.6.1 and 1.3
respectively)

I know that my Acer Aspire One (intel 945GME video) can easily do
2048x2048 and my understanding is that anything above 2304x2304 will
suffer a speed penalty (Intel limitation). I would expect that any
laptop made in the last 3 years will easily reach this resolution.

Fedora 10 (and 11 which is actually still in preview and will be
released in another week barring any more setbacks) by default does not
actually create an xorg.conf file at all and builds it on the fly at
startup. There are many reasons for this including hardware changes and
userland control over the display options which both GNOME and KDE have
some very nice display tools which allow you to clone or extend multiple
displays, etc.

Now I know that Joseph is far more knowledgeable than I am about X/video
displays, etc. and this concept clearly doesn't work for all hardware
types. If you go off the reservation (i.e. use proprietary nVidia or ATi
blob drivers), you have no choice but to create xorg.conf files. I did
that on my Acer netbook because I desperately wanted a 'virtual' screen
larger than the actual 1024x600 and it works great.

I know on a Fedora system, if you needed to coerce a different
resolution, you could go to 'Administration=>Display' and choose it to
see if you can make it happen. Now 22" display doesn't really say enough
because some of them are 16x9 (wide) and might give you a resolution of
say 1600x1050 but if it's a 4x3 (normal), you should easily be able to
get 1600x1200 on the external display and then it would be your choice
whether to 'clone' or 'extend' the laptop display. On KDE 4 Fedora 10 or
Fedora 11, they also have a Krandr plasmoid that gives you immediate
access to the display properties as a user but of course, the only
options are those that are available either as supplied by the xorg.conf
file you generate or if none is available, whatever the settings were
created on the fly.

There is also a log of the X server startup...on Fedora, this would
be /var/log/Xorg.0.log and it would report all of the various possible
resolutions and the relative success output if desired.

The video card information can be found by running the command...

sudo /sbin/lspci -v

The display information can be found in the Xorg.0.log as described
above but you might be able to change that by tweaking the display
configuration by the Ubuntu equivalent to Fedora's
'system-config-display --reconfig' command

Craig


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.