Multiple Monitors for Linux Laptops?

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."

Comments

NVIDIA TwinView

[moosesocks]

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.

Depends on the graphics chipset

[ShmuelP]

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 and http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Xinerama-HOWTO.html.

Re:huh? windows works great

[JabberWokky]

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.

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Evan