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Multi-Display Graphics Suites Compared
Bender writes "There's an interesting comparison at TR between the major graphics players' multi-desktop software/hardware suites, like NVIDIA's nView and Matrox DualHead. These suites provide monitor positioning, application-level window memory, multiple virtual desktops, and the like. This is necessarily a Windows-centric comparison, but it's interesting to consider how Linux, X, and various desktop managers would match up with these solutions in terms of features and abilities."
Macintoshes have supported multimonitors and extended desktops for nearly 10 years... why not compair macs along with them too?
My potato gun was confiscated by the United Nations. They said I wasn't allowed to have weapons of mash destruction.
This wasn't possible years ago in the 3x xservers, but maybe it happened in 4 and I just don't know.
Can you change the resolution of X while it is running AND the "virtual resolution"
You can do the Ctrl-Alt-"+" or "-" to change the res, but you just scroll around on the largest resolution in your XF86Config.
Example: I am running in 1024x768, want to let me mom use the computer and she likes 640x480 because it is easy to read. What to do?
I'd be really interested in finding out how the dual monitor configuration works out.
Do both screens need to have the same resolutions/refresh rates? What about Quartz acceleration, is it on both displays simultaneously, or just one at the time? Do the popups show up in the middle of one screen or split between the displays like on the Matrox/PC...
Gimme your rants and raves about that card.
--- Worst tagline ever.
anyone got something similar for Linux?
A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Two 19" screens on a Matrox G400. Yum! I didn't have any problems getting everything working, and Matrox has decent Linux support, although I wish they'd put out driver updates more than once a year. Kicker dies a lot after I moved to X 4.2, and quite a few people are having similar problems. New drivers are promised Real Soon Now, so we'll see what happens.
I dread having to use computers with just one screen now; I don't think I could ever go back. I'm thinking about hooking up a third monitor, actually. Need a reinforced desk and a small nuclear generator to power all this crap though.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
It's good that all these fancy graphics cards are going to better use than trying to achieve a "constant 60 (fps)" in Doom III. No more will people be able to claim that they achieve optimal desktop usage with a 1MB Cirrus Logic 7440 graphics card.
There's a lot more that could be done for Linux desktops and especially Windows XP, though MacOS leads the way. Everything is like a pdf file, rendered quickly and seamlessly through OpenGL.
It's a shame, however, that third parties have to hack in extended desktop support externally for Windows, as its GUI integration was a truly pitiful idea. With Linux, the source can be modified, but unfortunately companies have little reason to do so.
...not because of the desktop space that you lose, but because applications will still remember your desktop space as being double, and will leave some of your apps stranded off-screen. Maybe I was just unlucky, but neither software package fixed this for me.
Of course, you can still move main windows via keyboard shortcuts, but certain detachable, child windows of applications (eg, Winamp's Playlist) could not be accessed via keyboard shortcut to move, and were stuck off-screen. The only fix was to re-attach the second display, or uninstall/reinstall Winamp so that it would forget all of its screen positions.
I'm sure there's another way to fix window position memory configs (via registry and what-not), but really -- shouldn't the software take care of this for me? Neither software did much to help me once the second display was removed, and the screen resolution adjusted down to one display. Somewhat thoughtless, IMHO.
Needless to say a lot of people here will complain that nobody will use more than a monitor of screen space, or that two would be over kill.
<rant>Seriously though, developers will take as much space as you can throw at them, and they will be more productive. Really, when will managers and procurement people realize that programmers need bigger screens and faster/better boxen? I'm tired of watching our department clerk get the newest machine simply because she's been here 20 years.</rant>
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
Hell, I remember running a dual head/dual monitor setup back on an old, dusty Mac II with 2 video cards.
Why has it taken >15 years for the Windows world to finally catch up?
Test your net with Netalyzr
X will do this without any extra drivers.
The Xinerama extention ships with every current distribution that I know of. You just need to configure it.
Hpmh. I knew those windows users were freaks...Freaks I say!
I don't have a sig...Do you??
I am currently at work using 4 monitors all run by the Colorgraphic Predator video card. I don't know the technical details of the card (IANAT - i am not a techie) but i must say the setup i have kicks ass. the card is described here
OS/2 (and thus eCS) also allow via REXX, for window positions to be monitored, restored, moved, etc when apps are opened or closed... takes a little REXX knowledge (litterally a little) and some competent (but minimal... maybe a couple hundred lines if that much) programming and object positioning and state (which is what it really is under OS/2 & eCS) can be enhanced above it's current capabilities.
Looks like once again companies had to spend time writing around a MS deficiency.
Oh well...
-Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
Why do all the graphics card companies feel a need to come up with their own monitor spanning software, which is without exception, garbage. I mean, Windows sucks, but there is one thing they did *absolutely fucking right*, and that's their multi-monitor support.
It's beautiful. It works extremely well. It's flexible and well-supported.
Why must each of the graphics card companies reinvent the wheel, and make their wheel square, and connect in a different way?
I did IT with my current employer before moving up to my current programming job, and I remember how many types of graphics cards and versions of graphics drivers we went through before we found one that was even remotely acceptable. A particular version of the Matrox drivers for the Millenium G450 have a little checkbox hidden away during the install (and only during the install) that will let you install the "extra" support for Windows' multi-display.
Note to multi-display driver writers: No one (that I know at least) wants windows that maximize across monitors. No one wants toolbars that span across monitors. No one wants resize-handles on their maximized windows if you are kind enough to provide the option to NOT maximize across monitors. Not everyone wants both their monitors at the same resolution (GRR! that one really frustrates me). Not everyone can run both monitors at the same refresh rate, either. And NOT EVERYONE puts their second monitor to the right of the first one.
All of these things are handled flawlessly by Windows' multi-monitor support. The same multi-monitor support that's been there since Windows 98SE. (or was it Windows 98?) Let it do what it does best, and focus your energy somewhere less counter-productive, thanks.
Random and weird software I've written.
Appendix:
On Predatory spider's vision: The predatory spider has eight simple eyes of various sizes that respond to key aspects of the visual field. Tactile sensations derived from the web are more important to spiders than vision is
I'm running a nVidia-based dual-headed system and have been greatly disappointed with its performance. I used to run an ATI system which was completely awful; the drivers were so badly kludged they disrupted my system's operation. nVidia's drivers are much more stable, thankfully, but ATI's were able to do so much more...
When I read the review, however, they showed a snapshot of nVidia's nView Desktop Manager control panel, and it has a LOT more options than mine, including playing with individual application settings... All the features I've been missing. Wow, I figured, I must be using an old driver package. Updated it... And the window hasn't changed.
Is there a separate upgrade package for the nView drivers?
I'm writing this from a machine with two displays and TWO cards: Matrox G400 AGP and Matrox Millenium II PCI. This is what I came to after a long quest for a dualhead setup.
Just a few points:
And while with the dual card setup one card has to be PCI, you can still build a way more powerful combination, compared to any dualhead card.
I just got my ATI Radeon 7500 working in X. Here are some things I found.
/. until the build is finished.
First my biggest problem was the card will only see monitors that are connected when last reset. I spent 2 days trying to get the card to see a monitor I connected after Linux had booted. It was just dumb luck that we had an extended power outage that drained my UPS. When I powered back up, I still had the monitor turned on, and it got initiliaed by the card.
Second the DVI port is the primary display, if you have both connected. I guess that makes sense, but I had them backwards in my head cause I have 2 VGA CRTs, and had to use an adaptor on the DVI port to hook up my (second) monitor.
I like to configure my XFree86 by just typing `X -configure`. That doesn't detect the second monitor (and due to a bug I'll get to in a second configures the primary monitor incorrectly). The configuration file created by X was a good starting point, but I would have to manually add the settings for the second monitor.
What was odd, is X was being displayed on my primary monitor, but the settings in the file were from my secondary. Looking at the log file created, it seems that the Radeon was reading the DCC information from the second monitor (and after I got both displays initilizing both monitors were being seen with the same DCC info even though they are very different displays).
What I ended up doing was searching the Internet for some sample XF86Config files that had Xinerama enabled. I found a few some even for the Radeon 7500. To get the correct monitor info. I just plugged one monitor into the real VGA port, started X and looked in the log for the timings. I then hard coded the values for my primay display to override the falsely detected DCC infomation (X gives you big warnings when you manual specify timings higher than the monitor reports, which normally would be a good thing, but in this case I was right, so I'll have to live with the warnings).
After I plugged in the right values, and added the approate lines to my "-configure" generated file I had X running on two different sized displays with my desktop being stretched across them.
Also note that DRI is disabled in X on the ATI Radeon 7500 when using Xinerama, which means no hardware accelorated OpenGL (just like in Windows on this card).
As for my window manager Enlightenment 0.16.5 it is somewhat Xinerama aware. There are a few little bugs. First it likes to put things were I don't have a desktop due to me running two different resolutions on the displays. That probally won't effect most people. The biggest pain is it doesn't maximize windows correctly when they are on the second head. I don't maximize much, so I have just learned to expand the windows to size by hand.
The virtual desktops and multiple desktops of Enlightenment work just as before, they are just twice as large now. I'm sure I could have as many as I wanted, only limited by memory. The pager display shows everything correctly, include the black hole where there is no desktop.
Applications tend to pop up menus half on one screen, half on the other, Enlightenment also suffers from this, but not as much as I usually am clicking in the middle of the screen, but around the shared edge things get annonying.
All in all I can live with it. I don't play games so OpenGL isn't a big deal. I have my webbrower and mail on one screen and an Eterm or two on my other where I'm doing work. What ever I'm focused on most I'll put on the main display. If I'm just compiling something big I it is nice to put it over on the second head so I can keep an eye on it, but focus on
On the whole, I found that, as usual, configuring multiple monitors (I use nVidia cards, although I don't recommend you buy them) was a little more work under Linux than under Windows, but that it ended up working better. X11 seems to provide a better abstraction layer, insulating applications from the idiosyncracies of the underlying hardware. Furthermore, on X11, window placement and management has been factored into a separate application, so you aren't tied to vendor-supplied hacks in order to make things work with multiple screens--you just use any window manager that supports Xinerama.
I've been using a multimonitor XFree86 setup since the release of XFree86 4.0.
First I used two 3dfx Voodoo3's to power my 3200x1200 resolution. I was constantly annoyed by the lack of 3D hardware acceleration, so I disabled Xinerama mode, and ran X in DualHead mode. The only differnce in doing this was that I could no longer move windows from one screen to the other. The mouse cursor traveled freely between screens. Granted this was annoying too, but at least I could play quake2 again.
Then I happened upon a nice tidbit on the Xpert mailing list. That is, you can run Xinerama mode with NVidia cards and get hardware accelerated 3D on one of the heads. I replaced one of the voodoo3's with a TNT2 and I've been happy ever since.
I'm always thinking about upgrading my video card, and these one card solutions seem like the way to go. With NVidia's nView and Matrox's Powerdesk? you can have both heads appear to XFree86 as one logical screen and therefore run hardware accelerated 3d on BOTH SCREENS. I read that this was suppored by both Matrox and NVidia XFree86 drivers, so I started shopping for my next video card. But the dilema that I've constantly run into, is one that is not even addressed in this article. That is, the Max Resolution of the second monitor is severly limited. I have yet to find a single card solution that will handle 3200x1200 in 24bpp (or even 16 for that matter).
Perhaps the new Parhelia's will do it, I'm not sure. I've had to do a fair amount of digging just to find out what I do know. It seems like the only place that has reliable information about the issue is the complaining that goes on in mailinglists from people dissatisfied with the products they have purchased.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
Graphics Cards Tested
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB
Matrox Parhelia-512 128MB
WTF, why is he testing the 9000? They mention the 9700, but went with the 9000 for benchmarks. This is purely absurd.
The 9700 is 4x faster than the 9000, and 2x the 4600 in these fps benchmarks. The 9000 isnt even a replacement for the 8500 out. The 9500 is the replacement, and its not even out yet.
BTW, I run the 9700 dual, playing counterstrike on a 21 inch monitor and a 60inch projection at the same time (mirror mode). The tv output at 1024x768 (svhs) is crystal clear, and is truely amazing.
NOTE: With nView, the two displays have to be beside each other under X.
This caused me to look at using multiple cards instead of multiple headed cards.
I have one 21" and two 17" monitors, and I wanted the primary display (21", middle, AGP) to be able to be upgraded seperately from the secondaries (PCI, one on either side of the primary), as I have no interest in spanning 3D games across screens. Granted, I could have done three with the Matrox card, but then I'd always have to upgrade to another 3-monitor card. The solution I went with was to have one nVidia AGP card for the primary (currently a TNT2 Ultra, to be upgraded later) and two GForce 2 PCI cards for the secondaries. The GF2s are plenty fast for 2D, and fast enough to run small 3D accelerated toys/apps/screensavers too. The only downsides are the use of more expansion slots than using a dual-headed card and that 3D acceleration won't span. The upsides are that each one is running full speed, they're completely independant so multiple resolutions/frequencies is less of a problem, and the primary display can be upgraded seperately from the secondaries. I believe I could also run seperate X servers on each card if that ever became useful.
So if you want spanning 3D acceleration or are low on expansion slots, go with a multihead card. Otherwise, think about doing it this way.
OK, so there isn't a lot of real content in this post, but I thought I'd share a setup success story. When doing multi-card multi-head systems I'd *highly* recommend sticking with the same chip line/maker, and I'd just as highly recommend it be nVidia. Getting these three cards working together couldn't have been simpler...
Dual monitors may be less expensive, but at work I have a 24" 16:10 ratio monitor. It's so wide that it feels like having two monitors, only there's no seam between them.
http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=winxp-2k_archive
Shows the latest signed driver (3.0.8.2) and the new drivers up to 4.0.7.2, with nView v.2.0.
In the trading industry, some users have as many as 10 Monitors all running from 1 PC, and I've heard of more. Most traders have at least 4. There are a few companies besides Matrox that can provide that, and of the ones that do, none do it as well as Matrox.
It's worth the $1200 (CAD) to purchase a G200 MMS (quad) over anything else we've ever tried. Even on dual screens, unless you need 3D, Matrox is the way to go.
One nice benefit is that all 4 monitors can run different resolutions and color depths at the same time.
Do I have/want a G200 at home on my desktop? No.
But I don't have/want a s/390 as my desktop either. That doesn't mean an s/390 is crap. It just isn't suited to that particular role. Same with Nvidia. It's great for games, but it's crap apart from games.
Ok, Maybe I want to have an s/390 at home... Still... You get the idea...
"The next logical step is virtual desktops."
;)
I absolutely agree. There is a program called VirtuaWin for Windows that does this, too. If you're using a Windows box and miss your virtual desktop goodness, now you can have it.
I set up VirtuaWin to use Ctrl-Left and Ctrl-Right to cycle around desktops, but it's pretty infinitely flexible -- you can assign key shortcuts to each desktop (like you're mentioning) as well.
This program is definitely worth checking out. It's even GPL -- how weird is that for a Windows program?
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IMHO my monitor support w/ XF4 is better then windows. Not only do you have xinerama that lets you spread your desktop accross multiple displays like windows does. But you can also have it, so that you can use the displays (almost*) as if you had two seperate computers, even have different WM on each
(*still shares mouse and keyboard, ie which ever screen you got the (core) mouse on has focus)
an advantage to windows is that you dont loose HW acceleration when ur spreading desktop. While w/ xinerama you do. but not with the multi WM setup. (which is what I use)
And setting up either aint that difficult, I remember when I was still using mdk (2 years ago) that the CD installer could even do it (I think it was 8.0)
It's called "Xinerama" and it's part of XFree86 4. Your window manager is probably capable of application/windowID/group position memory, etc. I know Gnome/E and Gnome/Sawfish are, and I suspect KDE is also. You can do a helluvalot in xrdb, which is all the windowmanagers do... and you can do that however you wanna.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Damn, I thought I was the only one who did that. A $50,000USD shopping cart is a piece of cake.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
I've got a VisionTek GeForce4 440 MX ($120, Insight) running two 19" Trinitron monitors at work. The newest drivers do support running a true dual-monitor mode (not stretched desktop) on Windows 2000. For any multi-monitor system worth its' salt, this is a must.
Now, about the 3 reboots it took to make it all work...
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Thats all well and fine... but what I want is a motherboard that has DUAL AGP slots. anyone know of any out there that have this.
When I worked at intel i wrote some departments requesting this, but didnt get very far...
here is an interesting concept for multi monitoring:
It would be interesting to have a single computer setup with different inputs and different monitor output. Each screen would have a privilage level, and all inputs would only be associated with their individual screen.
This would allow for a Kiosk to be setup in say a mall - with a single computer that has multiple screens, keyboards and mice attached. Each screen would have its own desktop - and could run a browser for example - but they would not interfere with eachother.
This would allow you to run all this off of one computer - thus saving costs.
Anything out there like this? Obviously it has many parallels to mainframe computering - network appliances etc... but I am specifically talking about running a standard PC with multiple monitors and mice and keyboards - not some crippled specially designed hardware.
I am currently using a G550 with two monitors. Neither in windows 2000 or Xfree86 can i adjust independent gamma on the monitors. Actually, it is even worse than that because i can adjust the gamma on only one monitor. The other monitor must be used without gamma correction.
IMHO, independent gamma correction on both monitors is necessary and i am surprised to see that the reviewer did not even hint about it.
Anybody with more experience/knowledge in this?
Has anyone tried an app called x2vnc? It works very similar to a dual monitor setup, but you can use two different computers. It uses VNCserver so you can even have an X windows server running x2vnc connected to a pc running windows with only one mouse and keyboard.
0xfeedface
" No one (that I know at least) wants windows that maximize across monitors. "
Maxtrox G550, ctrl+click on maximize, the entire screen is filled with a window. Why would I want this? Right-click, new vertical tab grouping in VS.net (hopefully Mozilla someday). Suddenly MDI makes serious sense when working within a particular application.
Yes, you may like SDI and one app per monitor, but MDI is something that mates so well with multiple monitors, you'll swear at every solution provider that doesn't support it. I find it's as useful as grouping application windows (like The Gimp) on a single virtual desktop in terms of productivity).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
You mean the Linux program detects your graphics cards and configures them for multimonitor (same as Xinerama?) use, like, automatically? Even if you don't have a multihead card? Wow, I think there's just one Windows version (95, I think) that can do that. I mean, aren't things supposed to be hard to do in Linux? That's what the Windows and Mac people are saying on /.
Can you do multimonitor with multiple graphics cards on Macs?
Do the Linux and XFree people realize they're not supposed to make things easy and powerful?
*Back to serious mode*
All this hokey-pokey's been done by X, years ago. Multimonitor, portable sessions, remote clients, graphical sessions over slow links, you name it. People should give the X Consortium a lot more credit than M$oft or Apple. I didn't have the xfreecfg but it took me only some Googling (Dejanews, back then) and a couple of tries correcting typos to get dual head on cheapo ATI cards from EBay. And that was about 3 years ago, when XFree86 was released.
When they were discussing the GF4 they said that no amount of work would get that series to work with independant mutlimonitor (different res, refresh, etc).
WRONG!
There is a simple registry tweak that will enable a checkbox to "Treat multiple outputs on an nView-capable board as seperate display devices". All that has to be done is disable nView in its control panel and apply this to the registry:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NVTweak]
"NvCplExposeWin2kDualView"=dword:00000001
Reset the system and find the checkbox, I have it under advanced> Desktop utilites.
Okay, installed the beta drivers, and it STILL doesn't do what I need it to.
Why can't it save position properly? I want it to start up MIRC and ICQ on monitor 2; why won't it work? I could do it on that stupid ATI card... I assume it's because ATI treated my desktop like one big monitor.
First, do not, under any circumstances, but ATI's Radeon 8500 dualhead. They suck. As the poster mentioned, DRI is disabled when you use Xinerama. Plus the binary-only Radeon 8500 driver doesn't work with Xinerama, in addition to the opensource ATI driver which doesn't work with Xinerama! Only the older opensource Radeon driver in XF 4.2 does Xinerama in any way on the 8500, and it still has drawing issues (the Gnome logout box sure mangles the one display).
As you mentioned, the "primary" display is the DVI connector. This is horrid because any bus traffic causes that display to show ghosting and other lines everywhere on the 8500. The ATI Radeon 9000 doesn't have this problem, but it's another mark against the card.
For multihead under Linux, I recommend buying a G550 and skipping ATI, because their cards are not fun to setup and debug (I spent an entire day of my time trying to work with their broken drivers).
I found a "known-good" Xinerama config on GoogleGroups, and used it to debug the 8500.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I dont know much about multi-display configs, but i am pretty sure that ATI does a better job of multi displaying things than NVidia, i especially like their hydravision (which NVidea stole from them and put in their GF4 cards, or am i mistaken about that one..toms had a review...somewhere)
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
is available from XI Graphics. This is a drop-in replacement for XFree86, and it includes (link points to) multimonitor support versions.
My pet peeve with the Matrox driver version is that it would not power down the second monitor, so it went to screen saver and never turned off, while the primary monitor did power off. This was indicated on the Matrox site as a known issue. From other comments here I gather there have been no releases lately of the Matrox XFree86 driver, so that's probably still true.
XI is faster than XFree86 in my subjective testing, and it works nicely. There's a free demo you can download to try it out.
John 17:20
So, I should but my network monitoring software on a virtual desktop? What the hell good is that? I need to know when my nodea are down ASAP, regardless of whatever else I'm doing. And I only run dual. The hardcore network guys I work with have six monitors, and want more. They've always got things going on that NEED to be seen the moment there is a problem.
And let's not even talk about the benefits you get when doing web developement having your editor on one screen and your browser on the other.
I find multi-monitor setups to be fantastically useful, and virtual desktop setups to be painfully useless.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I've been using a G400 with two 17" flat panels at work for the last year or two and things were working pretty good. Upgraded to Redhat 8.0 and things are not longer so good. Xinerama still works but characters from the left display get painted on the right randomly. The problem seems only to be related to kde apps mostly. The matrox support guy is aware of the problem (many people have it) but does not seem to be doing a whole lot to help solve it. The last beta release of the drivers was last february so i'm not to happy with Matrox's commitment to Linux. Time to pick up a new card. Suggestions anyone? It's gotta be cheap and it's gotta do dual heads.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
They never used to, but the past two releases have done Xinerama beautifully, works perfect under KDE.
Also what the orginal story seems to forget that it is not neccasary to have special cards to have dual monitors. I had it under 98 with two pci vid cards. Not as nice perhaps but pretty cool for the time. It should still be possible to do this with 1 agp and 1 pci although it may not be possible if the main card is a built in since these tend to presume you either want them or an external card.
I also seem dimly to recall that I had this config with linux but I might be confusing that with my other matrox.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The article failed to mention Matrox's staple of the stock-trading world, the G200 MMS. It's a quad-head card PCI card with ability to drive 4 DVI panels. I've been using one for about eighteen months now, and after using good DVI panels (I now have IBM 17" LCDs) I will never go back to an MM setup with analog panels. The difference in clarity and response is well worth it.
e .c fm
http://www.matrox.com/mga/products/g200_mms/hom
Maxspeed makes this terminal which extends keyboard, video, mouse and I/O from a base PC. You run CAT5 from the terminal to the PC and plug it into a special card in the PC. There are cards with 4 ports and cards with two ports. It works well for souped-up point of sale applications - one PC at the front of a small store can handle several terminals.
Just to be clear, this is not TCP/IP. It is keyboard, video and mouse signals multiplexed on cat5. If using a GUI, you run a separate X Server per terminal on the PC. They are very Linux friendly - I used them with Red Hat.
I run dual 17" monitors (GF4 MX and a GF2 MX) on Windows 2000 Professional and I don't even bother with NVidia's NView app. Haven't found a single use for it other than it being unreasonably slow for features I don't need. For everything Windows 2000 doesn't do out of the box, I just use UltraMon.
UltraMon still leaves a bit of a memory footprint but it's not nearly as bad or as slow as NView. It's this unobtrusive (and persistent) little system tray icon that gives me all kinds of settings that NView seems to offer as well, except faster. Some of the features I appreciate in particular are:
Shortcut keys to swap programs between monitors (proportionally or to fit - INCREDIBLY useful if you run different resolutions)
Shell extensions for switching monitors or maximizing.
A simple double-click on the systray icon (or a definable keyboard shortcut) to turn off the secondary monitor on demand, such as if you want to run an OpenGL game without the second monitor looking all weird.
Individual desktop wallpaper settings.
The program itself creates shortcuts that set a program to start on a certain monitor.
Saving window sizes and positions.
You can enable two separate taskbars if you want, and either have each taskbar show all the tasks or have each separate taskbar show the tasks running on that specific monitor.
That's the bulk of its features. Great little program. Unfortunately, yes, it is $40 to register, and there are discounts for multiple licenses, but for me personally it was well worth the cost for the extreme ease of use it provides me with my monitors.
I have tried NView, but it kind of seems like it's trying too hard to be useful, where UltraMon just works, and works great. I'd definitely recommend it for anyone with dual monitors.
Can you drag apps between them
no, alas you can't, for exactly the same reason that I can't repoint an app displaying on box one to an X server on box 2 while the app is running. it's a bugger though, that would be very cool. still, I'm sure it's coming via some enteprising hacker.
dave
In any case, the real cost issue is licensing and the big flat screens. The PC itself costs almost nothing in comparison.
well, it's been done in other X setup's.
as I understand it, with a system of sunray thin clients and a big sunserver. you put your ID card into the reader on the sunray and log in etc. then if you pull the card out it all disappears. go to another term and your old session reappears there.
can anyone comfirm this? and is there any chance we could see this kind of functionality in XF86? (which I would love, then I could transfer from desktop to laptop seamlessly).
a method of repointing single X clients from one server to another would also be a pretty cool thing.
dave
plz note you can drag windows around with xinerama
yeah, the problem with that is that it's suddenly one big display, and not 2 (or more) independant displays. when it's one big display then you're talking one wm for the pair, ie windows maximising across a monitor bezel etc, which just seems kind of hideous to me.
with 2 independant displays then you can have different wm's on each, when you maximise a window there is no danger that it will span monitors (and what happens in xinerama if you have three screen's in an L arrangement?)
dave