Ask Slashdot: Hardware Accelerated Multi-Monitor Support In Linux?

An anonymous reader writes "I'm an Engineer with a need for 3 large monitors on the one PC. I want to run them as 'one big desktop' so I can drag windows around between all three monitors (Windows XP style). I run Debian and an nVidia NVS450. Currently I have been able to do what I want by using Xinerama which is painfully slow (think 1990s), or using TwinView which is hardware accelerated but only supports 2 monitors. I can live without 3D performance, but I need a hardware accelerated 2D desktop at the minimum. What are my options? I will happily give up running X and run something else if I need to (although I would like to keep using Xfce — but am open to anything). I am getting so desperate that I am starting to think of running Windows on my box, but that would be painful in so many other ways given my work environment revolves around the Linux toolset."

Comments

Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows figured this out in the late 1990s, and you're telling me that Linux still can't do it right in 2013?

I would say I'm surprised, but that seems about right for Linuks.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[TheRealMindChild]

Even Windows took a step back with XP. In 9x, you were able to use any mix of video cards for each monitor. With XP, the driver model changed and you had to have the same card (or similar cards, but the drivers themselves had to have the support)

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's hope for Wayland

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Multi-monitor isn't the problem here. Hardware-acceleration is the problem.

Last time I checked, officiak nVIDIA driver is the only one which implements 2D render acceleration which is still marked as experimental (for like 10 years), and that is only partially supported by other GUI functionalies, such as multi-monitor - most applications/toolkits don't even know it. Hardware-acceleration except 3D for gaming is difficult with X-window because:

1) You need X-window to have that acceleration API
2) You need X-window drivers (per-vendor) to implement the acceleration API
3) You need various X-window extensions to make use of the acceleration API
4) You need GUI toolkits to provide a layer of higher-level acceleration API to support the acceleration API in X-window and make use of it
5) You may also need GUI apps to make use of the higher-level acceleration API

It cannot change overtime, and since nobody cares about hardware acceleration except gamers, there can be no acceleration for your regular 2D/GUI work, no progress in the field for so many years. About 3 years ago I can still notice that quick-scrolling on webpage appears to be much slower on x-window than winodws (using opera browser), though it doesn't hurt usability.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Zeussy]

I'm confused by this. I have 7 monitors on one machine, 3 connected to an AMD Radeon, the other 4 connected to a Nvidia Geforce (using a matrox triple head 2 go, to make 3 appear as 1 monitor to the card). And it all works seamlessly. Even have 3d applications/meda players spanning across them and it works. (Not quite sure how the 3D side of things work, backbuffer from one copied to the other?)

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[interval1066]

Ok, Linux needs help in the video department, but its more the fault of the manufacturers who want to keep their code licensed in such a way that it exludes OSS. Intel has been good, but the support from all the major gpu vendors could be better. And I know what OP means by developing on Linux; doing development on Windows is like keeping one arm tied behind your back after doing Linux development, target platforms aside.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's because it was fixed in vista or 7. Probably vista when they switched to the new driver model.

Doesn't stop the zealots from spouting nonsense.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Iwas just going to suggest the matrox TripleHead2Go, but it's apparently limited to 5760x1080 (3x 1920x1080) or two screens combined to 3840x1200 (2x 1920x1200). I'd say that doesn't qualify as three big screens.

Does anyone know how multiple screens daisy-chained via their display-port outputs appear to the system?

It's really a pity that functionality that's been available since 15 years on SGI Onyx computers hasn't found its way into all desktop systems.

Btw, is there any good reason why the idle power consumption of graphics cards increases significantly when more than one (or in some cases two) monitors are connected?

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Tripkipke]

It can...

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know how multiple screens daisy-chained via their display-port outputs appear to the system?

They appear as separate monitors.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[thecross]

Oh, the days of using separate video cards for 2D and 3D support. It was "cool" to have a setup like that, but somehow I was never interested and held out for the TNT2.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

It cannot change overtime, and since nobody cares about hardware acceleration except gamers, there can be no acceleration for your regular 2D/GUI work, no progress in the field for so many years. About 3 years ago I can still notice that quick-scrolling on webpage appears to be much slower on x-window than winodws (using opera browser), though it doesn't hurt usability.

Wayland.

Why Wayland? As you noted, X sucks (even according to the opinion of the X server's own maintainers).

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux cannot support it. The required DMA-BUF functions are GPL only kernel calls.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really the people who are actually the main target of the drivers. (People using Quadro's for CAD / CAM / CAE). Would want it.

The Card he has is £500 (Not very good compared to gaming cards but at least you can use opengl anti aliased lines thing).

If I had that card I would use 2 X screens - seperate keyboard and mouse for one of them.

The Render extension and hardware accelerated 2D are not the same thing.

Nvidia only cares about the people using Quadro's on Linux / Solaris (Only reason there is a driver in the first place).

I only really know about Cadence which is a pita to use on Linux or Solaris but basically impossible to use on Windows in a way that is predictable. (Uses the registry instead of scripts and config files. Cannot even make sure 2 machines are configured the same very easily. And a mistake costs a minimum of $100,000 if you make an asic)

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Btw, is there any good reason why the idle power consumption of graphics cards increases significantly when more than one (or in some cases two) monitors are connected?

In searching the answer for the infamous never-waking-up-from-the-power-saving-state-black-screen in a hd7xxx cards, I stumbled upon the bit of information that if using HDMI connector to drive the monitor, the deep power saving state never activates and the black screen problem doesn't occur. It may be that either using multiple DVI connections or DPs and HDMI with DVIs, the deepest power saving states don't activate.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[edman007]

> Btw, is there any good reason why the idle power consumption of graphics cards increases significantly when more than one (or in some cases two) monitors are connected?

A few reasons, but if you have twice the pixels then the video card needs to read twice as much data out of it's output buffers (one 1080p@60fps monitor would require ~2.9Gbps of writing to DVI, two 1080p monitors would require 6Gbps of writing to DVI). For idle card that are not doing much, and especially one with a very weak GPU like many of the onboard ones that might be a good chunk of their power. But for the high end gaming GPUs, I don't think it should matter all that much, if the 3D application is drawing to more pixels then it will probably use more power, otherwise I don't think it would be a significant difference.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows figured this out in the late 1990s, and you're telling me that Linux still can't do it right in 2013?
No! Windows did not figure this out in the late 1990's! Nvidia provided support in the late 1990's, about 30 seconds before accelerated multi-monitor support showed up for Linux. Linux also provides the open nouveau driver which provides unaccelerated multi-card multi-monitor support, and there is no equivalent to that in the windows world. The guy is asking about more than 2 monitors, (which windblows does *not* support, nor does Nvidia's current offerings for Linux). (I know that you were just being blowhardy but I fixed it for you anyway).

Re: Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an idiot. You realize that initially Wayland is going go use a bunch of drivers ported from X right? An issue stemming from lack of drivers will continue to be an issue...

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[slohandave]

oh please, trivial shit, i had a Mac II with 6 monitor all sharing one desktop in 1990. your just trying to crack an egg with a sledgehammer...... again, use the right tool for the job and life is easy.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[cnettel]

Wrong. It was totally OK in XP. It was Vista that broke it for WDDM (the new driver model), but I think 7 fixed it "back".

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[LifesABeach]

I see the six monitors, the laptop, and the demo that uses Compiz.

But no reference to how it was done, why?

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Tawnos]

Not quite. I used to work on the windows display management kernel and did a ton of testing when we brought back heterogeneous in Win7. In XDDM (XP Display Driver Model), heterogeneous was allowed, but it had issues when drivers would conflict. You could find some setups that worked and some that didn't, largely based on the drivers, cards, and the alignment of the planets.

When Windows Vista came out the drivers moved to WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model). This model initially disallowed heterogeneous configurations. In Win7, heterogeneous support was again allowed, partially because the OS now tracked monitor connectivity state (CCD - connecting and configuring displays). Previous versions of windows had left that to the individual drivers, which could cause conflicts and loops of bad behavior ("value add" software from vendor x sets "clone" mode, then from vendor y sets extend mode, and they fight back and forth, for example).

So in Windows, it was allowed for every release except Vista, though it wasn't really supported or tested well until 7 and beyond.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Goaway]

Somehow, manufacturers keep their Windows driver code entirely closed, yet still manage to support multiple monitors.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[sgt scrub]

You can use 3d acceleration to generate a scene or just draw in 2d. The problem is it would require complete rewrites of the libraries used for 2d widgets.

Function Line3d( mesh, x0#,z0#,x1#,z1#, y# , r, g, b)

        If mesh = 0
                mesh = CreateMesh()
                surf = CreateSurface(mesh)
        Else
                surf = GetSurface(mesh,1)
                If CountVertices(surf)>30000
                        surf = CreateSurface(mesh)
                EndIf
        End If

        dx# = x1 - x0
        dz# = z1 - z0
        d# = Sqr( dx*dx + dz*dz ) * 4.0
        dx = dx / d
        dz = dz / d

        v0 = AddVertex( surf , x0-dz, z0+dx , y )
        v1 = AddVertex( surf, x1-dz, z1 + dx, y )
        v2 = AddVertex( surf, x1+dz, z1 - dx, y )
        v3 = AddVertex( surf, x0 + dz, z0 - dx , y )

        For v = v0 To v3
                VertexColor surf, v, r,g, b
        Next

        AddTriangle surf,v0,v1,v2
        AddTriangle surf,v2,v3,v0

                entityfx mesh,2
        Return mesh

End Function

Re: Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's in the video info. Look for XGL and XServer. This is also entirely dependent upon specific hardware and drivers. Not all work, else I'd have posted my own vids by now.

It's also how Linux video wall renderings are done on clusters, as well that nice 24 monitor Quake3 video on YouTube from 2007.

Compiz is just the eye candy here.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you please post your xorg.conf? I don't know how you managed to do that across two different board brands without Xinerama, which is not accelerated.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[jones_supa]

Ok, Linux needs help in the video department, but its more the fault of the manufacturers who want to keep their code licensed in such a way that it exludes OSS.

To me (and to the submitter, I bet) it's more important to get accelerated multi-monitor going than the code being open source.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Somebody Is Using My]

Nvidia cards bump their performance up full speed (max clock and memory speed) when more than one monitor is attached. Supposedly this is design. . Fortunately, a third-party hack is available so you can have multiple monitors without blowing your energy budget. Sadly, it currently only works with n5xx or lower cards (more recent cards apparently use different power states).

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Tough Love]

Because the vendors driver code is not closed to Microsoft.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. I used to run dual displays on XP with two completely different video cards. It worked fine.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[rrohbeck]

The open Radeon drivers have accelerated 2D too and they're slowly trickling into the latest distros. F19 has them and Ubuntu saucy too, although in a buggy state last I tried.

Re: Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[gagol]

And this is worse than starting from scratch because... ? They are concentrating their attention on fixing the protocol between applications (clients) and the server (the thing with beautiful moving colors attached to your computer)

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Miamicanes]

Oh, the days of using separate video cards for 2D and 3D support. It was "cool" to have a setup like that, but somehow I was never interested and held out for the TNT2.

> Oh, the days of using separate video cards for 2D and 3D support.
> It was "cool" to have a setup like that, but somehow I was never interested and held out for the TNT2.

And thanks to mass-market consumers who did the same thing, we ended up with video GPUs today that are basically a pimped out 3DFX stapled onto a dumb framebuffer, with no real 2D acceleration to speak of.

Instead of getting hardware-accelerated B-splines and the ability to render subpixel-hinted scalable fonts via hardware in realtime sometime around 2006 like we were supposed to (going by ATI's roadmaps), we have Android and IOS hardware built around GPUs that couldn't render a full page of hinted dealiased text a-la-Postscript to display memory in 1/60th of a second if the future of their manufacturers' companies depended on it. Because 3D is trendy, hot, and sexy, and 2D isn't.

Joe Sixpack doesn't know what a B-spline or subpixel rendering is, but he knows that 3D is "cool", and a GPU that has "more triangles" is better (the same way he "knew" a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 was better than a 1.1GHz Pentium III Xeon, and even ran out to buy a new laptop with one).

That's why Android & IOS-based e-readers suck for interactively reading technical books that require constant page-flipping. They lack 2D spline acceleration, so they have to do everything via brute CPU force. They're too slow to render pages from scratch in realtime with "real book" aesthetics, they don't have enough memory to pre-render the whole book to ram, and they're too slow to fetch entire pre-rendered arbitrary pages from microSD in 1/60th of a second or less(*).

(*) The fastest microSD interface on any known Android phone maxes out around 25MB/s.... and a 32-bit 1280x800 bitmap weighs in around 4MB. Real-world Android phones like the S3 generally max out around 17MB/s. The fastest UHC-1 Sandisk Extreme cards have a theoretical max of 95MB/s, which STILL isn't fast enough to fetch the ~187MB/sec required for realtime brute-force 1280x800x60fps @ 24 bits. In theory, the 62MB/s required to fetch 8-bit grayscale at 60fps might be do-able on a future phone with UHC-1 microSD, but no current device can do it.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Miamicanes]

> You can use 3d acceleration to generate a scene or just draw in 2d.

Until hinted scalable fonts enter into the equation. Then everything goes straight to hell. If you tried to write pixel-shaders to define every single letter of every font, style, and weight used on a page in a way that's legible at 8 pixels tall and smooth & curved without artifacts at 100, and had a hard rule that you couldn't do anything that couldn't be fully-rendered from definition to rendering in 1/60th of a second, you'd run out of ram, time, and/or triangles LONG before you got to the end of a technical ebook's first real page.

The fundamental problem is that triangle-based acceleration is the *wrong* kind of acceleration for high-quality text rendering. Fonts need B-spline acceleration. Rendering text with triangles is like trying to emulate a Soundblaster Pro with a Gravis Ultrasound was back in 1993.Sometimes, you need hardware that's optimized for the specific task at hand, and trying to generalize it into something else just makes matters worse.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[iserlohn]

I'm on the proprietary Nvidia Linux driver with 2 monitors and adaptive mem/gpu clock speed. The clocks do appear to be scaling, so maybe this is a Windows driver problem?

Re: Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Word!

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Somebody Is Using My]

I couldn't say. The problem was acknowledged by nvidia (albeit as something intentionally designed rather than a bug) but perhaps it's a workaround for something in Windows. Supposedly ATI cards suffer a similar - if not as serious - flaw (IIRC only the memory speed clocks up). Its also possible that the problem only appears on certain GPU chipsets (definitely the 4xx and 5xx lines, and apparently the 6xx GPUs as well), so if you have an older or new card it may not effect you. There also seemed to be some argument if it always happened or if it required "different monitors" (e.g., some reported that using identical monitors did not trigger the problem).

In any event, the posted solution is also Windows-only. /That/ fact occurred to me roughly 2.7ns after I hit the submit button ;-)

Nonetheless, if you /do/ have one of those cards be aware that plugging in more than one monitor may cause it to ramp up to full speed, wasting electricity and generating excess heat for no good use. Unfortunately, it's not immediately obvious so I felt obligated to bring it to people's attention. If it doesn't happen to you, then count yourself fortunate (especially when your electric bill comes due). But checking is relatively easy (Windows users can use GPU-Z to see their GPU's current clock speed) and it may save you some money in the long run.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows..., and the alignment of the planets.

Is that why Allen got involved in SpaceX?

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be worth the effort. It's also the most viable option since OpenGL support is nearly complete for nVIDIA and AMD, while 2D acceleration is basically abandoned already.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Goaway]

I don't know if you are aware, but Microsoft is not developing those drivers.

Re: Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Have a friend who developed display drivers for wp8, he had the driver source and was making fixes for the hardware vendor. Same likely applies to desktop gpus.

Re: Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google signed distance fields and then reexamine your comment.

Re: Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Miamicanes]

Hmmm. Interesting. But now the million-dollar question... are signed distance fields fast enough on any current high-end Android or IOS hardware to actually render a full page of arbitrary text that includes multiple fonts and multiple styles of those fonts? All the examples I found via Google use it to render just a few glyphs at any one time.

Realistically, if you're rendering English text and you stick to pre-loading characters that are actually used or likely to be used, you're going to need about 80-90 for each font+style. For technical books, that realistically means at least 3 complete font sets in normal, bold, italic, and bold+italic -- usually, a serif font, a sans-serif font, and a monospaced "console" font with disambiguated zeroes and ones for code examples.

Ram-permitting, text has somewhat of the advantage that you can preload your font data, then reuse it from "scene" to "scene". On the OTHER hand, with a game, you can define a large scene, then just move the frustum around to change what's visible from frame to frame. With text, a new page means defining and rendering an entirely new scene from scratch... and doing it at 60fps without lag or latency is no small feat. Add page-turning visuals, and you have a task that could bring the development team from a game like "Battlefield 4" to their knees and have them begging for mercy (at least, when you tell them it has to work acceptably well on a MSM8960's Adreno 2 or a Tegra3, even if the device HAS a gig of ram and dual/quad-core 1.5GHz+ CPUs).

Text might not be sexy, but rendering print-quality text in realtime is *hard*. We've settled for less in the past, because text on a video display was always regarded as a second-rate ghetto that was good enough for nasty throw-away stuff, but was never expected to approach the visual quality and responsiveness of printed text on paper. Video displays have now largely caught up (like the iPad's retina displays), but the hardware we need to put them to proper use is still very much in its infancy. The industry used the slow update times of e-ink as an excuse for years, and when displays capable of crisp, high-resolution text display and instantaneous updates appeared, the underlying hardware wasn't even close to being ready to take advantage of it for anything besides sequential page-by-page reading of novels.

Re: Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[fluffynuts]

If I had mod points, you'd have them. I'd like a FLOSS world, but I'll take a working closed world over a broken open one. As much as I'd like to, I simply can't fix everything I come across that's broken, no matter how open it is.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[booch]

You could pre-render the page, compress it, then store that to SD. That'd probably be significantly faster than storing the full bitmap to slow storage, even with the compress/decompress overhead.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never had luck with the triple-head-2-go. Startech had this great little unit though that automagically detected the monitors plugged into it and presented it to the OS as a single, expansive monitor.
http://ca.startech.com/AV/Splitters/DisplayPort/Triple-Head-DisplayPort-Multi-Monitor-Adapter~SP123DP
Worked on our XP laptops without a driver install.

Re:Multi-Monitor Support in 2013?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have the xorg.conf for that setup?

Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

Subby, you have posted the stupidest Ask Slashdot question ever!

Re:Congratulations!

[mwvdlee]

Followed by the stupidest answer ever!
Congratulations to the both of you.
Well, mostly to the answer, as the question really isn't that stupid at all.

Re:Congratulations!

[bill_mcgonigle]

Sweet, it's like Stack Exchange, but with ad hominem attacks.

Re:Congratulations!

[jones_supa]

Subby, you have posted the stupidest Ask Slashdot question ever!

And you posted the stupidest Slashdot comment ever. Gratz!

Re:Congratulations!

[gagol]

Slashdot changed quite a bit in the last decade...

Re:Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

Entropy- It's not just a good idea.....

You've only got one real choice here

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait for Wayland.

Re:You've only got one real choice here

[serviscope_minor]

Yes, because Wayland has the magic pixie dust which makes the drivers support things that they never did before.

Re:You've only got one real choice here

[Anonymous Coward]

And a pony! Don't forget the pony!

Re:You've only got one real choice here

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait for Wayland.

He has work to do, he can't wait for a completely reworked display server to be released. :P

I do this currently..

[Anonymous Coward]

A pair of nvidia 9800gtx cards gives me quad DVI on which I run three monitors. The option you are seeking is basemosaic. I don't have the config in front of me or I would include it.

Re:I do this currently..

[amginenigma]

I also do not have the config in front of me, but mosaic is what you are looking for in your xconfig. Bit of googling (ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/256.35/README/sli.html) on that should point you in the right direction. And yes once configured it's as 'easy as Windowz...'

Re:I do this currently..

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me get this straight... Once I get past the excruciating configuration steps it's easy as Windows? Did you seriously just compare them?

The problem with lunix is all the stuff you just 'hand-waved' past: obscure commands, poorly written documentation, and a billion config files spread all over the hdd. You linuks types don't seem to understand that ease of use on windows and linux are no way, shape, or form comparable.

Stop lying to yourself and get a real desktop os.

Re:I do this currently..

[sideslash]

u mad steve?

Re:I do this currently..

[Mad Merlin]

That's not necessary anymore. Kepler based cards (GTX 600 and 700) support up to 4 monitors. I'm posting from 3 monitors connected to a GTX 670.

Re: I do this currently..

[Anonymous Coward]

/etc is the one place where configuration files are located for Linux /etc/X11/xorg.conf is the one file you need to edit to configure X
last time I checked there were not a billion files there

If you think Windows is easy to use, then that's ok and a matter of choice and opinion. But stop pretending you do know anything about "Linuks"

Re:I do this currently..

[Kagetsuki]

ditto but different cards. I didn't even think this was an issue.

Re:I do this currently..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take this as a desert from a salmon lunch I just had:
Obscure commands: Is an object-based shell in Windows then not obscure? Obscure as in relatively unknown to a time traveling UNIX user from the 80's?
Poorly written documentation: As opposed to no documentation at all?
Billion config files spread all over: /etc and dot folders as opposed to registry and application specific folders, let alone the system folders?

Now I feel like doing some wining, and perhaps discover the lost art of sarcasm.

Re:I do this currently..

[Anonymous Coward]

So let me get this straight... Once I get past the excruciating configuration steps it's easy as Windows? Did you seriously just compare them?

The problem with lunix is all the stuff you just 'hand-waved' past: obscure commands, poorly written documentation, and a billion config files spread all over the hdd. You linuks types don't seem to understand that ease of use on windows and linux are no way, shape, or form comparable.

Stop lying to yourself and get a real desktop os.

Amen!

Re:I do this currently..

[DaveV1.0]

What specifically did you google? How long did it take you to find that?

Re:I do this currently..

[DaveV1.0]

Why use Powershell when one can use a GUI to set it up in a less than a minute? The same goes for the documentation. The setup wizard for my NVidia card is straight forward and intuitive. All configuration for Windows can be done from within the GUI. There is no reason to go into the registry or application specific folders.

Basically, you are using a false analogy. You are trying to say that one must do things in Windows in a way that is often needed for Linux and never needed by Windows.

Re:I do this currently..

[yhetti]

I can confirm that BaseMosaic on an NVS450 works under LMDE (Debian Testing) using:

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device "Device0"
        Monitor "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth 24
        Option "BaseMosaic" "True"
        Option "MetaModes" "GPU-1.DFP-0: 1680x1050+0+0, GPU-0.DFP-1: 1680x1050+3360+0, GPU-0.DFP-0: 1680x1050+1680+0; GPU-1.DFP-0: NULL, GPU-0.DFP-1: NULL, GPU-0.DFP-0: 1680x1050"
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth 24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Re:I do this currently..

[yhetti]

I should mention I'm using relatively new drivers from NVidia's site, not the apt-able ones. 313.09, specifically, though after the 310.x series BaseMosaic hasn't broken any more.

Re:I do this currently..

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post restricted the view on commands. Easy to use GUIs do exist for Linux as well. Fiddling with the driver configuration files (inf), kernel or boot options mostly have to be done with "obscure commands" and editors in Windows as well. At least those aspects are almost-documented in Windows.

Re:I do this currently..

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I feel like doing some wining, and perhaps discover the lost art of sarcasm.

No! Don't turn to the drink!

Re: I do this currently..

[XcepticZP]

Let the OP call it "Linuks" all he wants... And it's his right, as long as I see linux users saying things such as "windoze", or as the GP said "windowz". Cheap jabs like that are really childish... If you want to say something like that, use the real words, like a grown up.

Damn hipsters and nu-age hippies, get off my lawn!

Re:I do this currently..

[aliquis]

Took me the first attempt when I knew what I was looking for.

Google: nvidia x sli

Second hit.

Re:I do this currently..

[Anonymous Coward]

Have to agree. I can do a lot of stuff in Linux, but most of the time doing the same thing in Windows is far easier. Especially today, Linux feels to be a bit behind the times.

Re: I do this currently..

[Anonymous Coward]

And with that, only 1 Screen section is required then? Nice!

Might consider switching back to Nvidia cards then.

Re:I do this currently..

[iserlohn]

Yes, same here on a 660. Twinview works with 3 monitors on 1 card as expected. 3D acceleration is working fine, I'm using gnome-shell (I can hear the gasps already).

Re:I do this currently..

[DaveV1.0]

How long did it take you to find out what you were looking for?

Re:I do this currently..

[aliquis]

Reading the post two steps above mine or whatever.

Though "dual monitor" seem like something which one would more likely search for than "sli", sli is even totally unrelated.

Tried a new search with: nvidia x dual monitor
Second hit there is: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/304.32/README/configtwinview.html

Which make more sense.

Third hit is: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaMultiMonitors

But none of those mention what he was suggested to use?

Anyway.. Whatever. Good to know where to find it later on if ever needed.

Re:I do this currently..

[nullchar]

Can you please post your "Device0" and "Monitor0" sections too? I'm confused by your MetaModes...

Re:I do this currently..

[yhetti]

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier "Monitor0"
        VendorName "Unknown"
        ModelName "Unknown"
        HorizSync 28.0 - 33.0
        VertRefresh 43.0 - 72.0
        Option "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Device0"
        Driver "nvidia"
        VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
        Option "SLI" "1"
        Option "Coolbits" "4"
EndSection

AH.... thanks for asking. I forgot teh "SLI" part : )

The NVS450 has 4 outputs; I'm using three of them. And they're not in the right order on the desk (according to the card)

Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

You get the best of everything by running Linux inside VM on Windows.

Re:Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah? Anyone managed to get TGIF running in a CentOS 6 VM under Win7? On my native install, TGIF worked fine, and shows up in the drop down menus. On the VM install, make completes without error, but TGIF is not in the menu, and it will not start. I am checking each install package by package, but I have not found any differences yet. So, I am not convinced a VM gives the best of everything.

Re:Windows

[interval1066]

No, I'll windows in a vm before I run linux. I get so much more usefulness out of linux than anything else.

Re:Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of retarded FUD is that?

A VM gives you what normal hardware gives you and is certainly not capable of producing such obscure errors as preventing an entry from appearing in a menu.

WTF. Take your stupid cargo-cult reasoning and stop using computers. You're too stupid.

Re:Windows

[Antique Geekmeister]

The reverse often works better for games and Windows specific software auch as Outlook or a great deal of CAD software. If your software needs the bare metal performance of vendor supported access to the graphics, such as many games require now, then I've found virtualizing the Linux to be far more efficient.

Re:Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I try to make sure that I always use the least secure operating system as the hypervisor. Playing fallout is much more important to me than having auditable, OSS software controlling the hardware, let alone a shell or terminal that is useful. /bye slashdot

Re:Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

So...you don't know how to make it work either?

Re:Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I'll windows in a vm before I run linux. I get so much more usefulness out of linux than anything else.

Actually Windows as the host is better as you are guaranteed to get full hardware support and the Windows desktop is much faster anyway.

You tried arandr already?

[tramp]

arandr is a standard package in Debian and can be used with Xfce too. http://packages.debian.org/unstable/main/arandr

Re:You tried arandr already?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use xrandr with Arch and Xfce and it works fine: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xrandr, so I suspect arandr for Debian will achieve the same results. How did this get past the /. moderators?

Re:You tried arandr already?

[russbutton]

I use xrandr with Windowmaker. Works fine for me. I rotate one of my monitors so I can view long listings and docs. Love the screen real estate!

Re:You tried arandr already?

[Anonymous Coward]

This. XRandR is the extension you want not Xinerama which as you say is stuck in the nineties.

You are Xcrewed!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen youtube videos of people doing this sort of thing with Compiz, but our best hope is for XOrg to just die and let Wayland fix this once and for all. I personally gave up on this sort of "cool" setup and switched the dark side of Unix and PC, yes Mac OS.

Re:You are Xcrewed!

[Anonymous Coward]

With Mac you also have the benefit of not having to wait ages for some OSS component being developed with low funding. Army of paid engineers and most of the shit works on day one.

huh? but this is working for at least 3 years now!

[Anonymous Coward]

This works out-of-the-box with any number of monitors (well, as many as the number of CRTCs provided by your GPU) for ATi Radeons (both free and proprietary drivers) and Intel (free drivers).

Now, embedded Intel usually only has two CRTCs, but the newer Radeons have at least three, up to six.

You just need to configure the viewports using your preferred desktop environment or directly using xrandr or the x.org config.

What driver do you use ?

[Coeurderoy]

You might be using the open source driver and not the nvidia driver.
We use Two GTX220 or GT650 and plug three or four terminals withouth any hassle, but we do use the proprietary nvidia driver.

And the result is quite fast (we typically test our games on two full HD monitors while running our development tools in one or two others.

I suspect the NVS450 is also more expensive than our setup :-)

BTW we use either debian or ubuntu depending of the whim of each developper.

Re:What driver do you use ?

[CnlPepper]

Games development on linux? Do you work for Valve?

Re:What driver do you use ?

[Mike Frett]

CnlPepper, yes real Game development. Especially when Leadwerks (Kickstarter) comes out, which allows you to make AAA quality Games for Linux IN Linux. Also Unity3D can export to Linux. Ogre (Torchlight) is OK if you want something free.

Re:What driver do you use ?

[houghi]

he official software also comes with nvidia-xconfig for the initial config, nvidia-settings to be run as root for the settings and nvidia-smi for the CLI part.
I use openSUSE and after adding the NVidia repo, I do the following:
1) Close X
2) As root, run nvidia-xconfig
3) Log back in as standard user
4) Open a terminal, su to root and run nvidia-settings
5) Configure anything as I desire
6) Restart X

I have a GeForce GT 520 (1GB) and a GeForce 8400GS (0.5GB) with 2x1920x1200 and 2x1920x1080. Both GPU's run at below 30% and I never had any issue with it being slow.

glxgears -fullscreen runs at 60FPS. Good enough for my eyes.

Re:What driver do you use ?

[Anonymous Coward]

OP here.

I am running the binary nVidia drivers. Can you please post a sample x conf file with it working?

For those that misunderstood me, I do have the three monitors working. It's just that I can't get hardware accelerated graphics and my desktop is painfully slow.

Re:What driver do you use ?

[Anonymous Coward]

xrandr --output DVI-I-2 --mode 1280x1024 --pos 0x0 --output DVI-I-3 --mode 1920x1200 --pos 1280x0

nvidia-settings --assign CurrentMetaMode= "DVI-I-2: 1280x1024 +0+0, DVI-I-3: 1920x1200 +1280+0"

etc. If you use Xinerama you lose acceleration or twinview can only do two screens.

Re:What driver do you use ?

[megabeck42]

Unfortunately, while the NVS series bare the Quadro branding, NVidia does not support the professional/scientific feature sets on those chips. So, features like the unified back buffer, etc. are not available. Essentially, the NVS450 is a card with two GeForce 8400 chips and a PCI-E to PCI-E bridge. It's kinda lame.

NVidia marketing material suggests that the NVS line is intended for business users who need to support many displays without any advanced rendering.

While you're right, I imagine the NVS450 costs more than a pair of GTX220 or GT650 cards; he'd be better served with your suggestion than the NVS card. Personally, I suspect his desktop is a Dell or HP professional workstation as they generally ship with NVS graphics as the entry-level video solution. I doubt he specifically chose the card.

Also, the best solution to his dilemma, IMHO, is the Matrox DualHead2Go or TripleHead2Go. I know it seems like having more GPUs would be a better solution, but I think less GPUs means less overhead in synchronization, mutexes, locks, etc. That's just a hypothesis... no data to back it up.

Re:What driver do you use ?

[jones_supa]

glxgears -fullscreen runs at 60FPS. Good enough for my eyes.

Facepalm... ;)

Re:What driver do you use ?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you tick the [x]box under OpenGL Settings > Performance > Sync to VBlank, then glxgears will be limited to 60 fps (or the screen refresh rate_.
if you un-tick the [ ]box then you will have more frames-per-second : )

Option "BaseMosaic" "boolean"

[Marrow]

Try the README.txt

Re:Option "BaseMosaic" "boolean"

[Anonymous Coward]

Go back to 2000 with your shitty linux help. I mean it's nice that you're pointing in the right direction, albeit cryptically, but seriously, you're not giving a real answer here.

Re:Option "BaseMosaic" "boolean"

[Marrow]

It is enough to google. And the README.txt file is well known to people who delve into the settings for the nvidia drivers. I was being helpful. You are not.
Did you answer his question thuroughly or at all? I thought not.

no good 'out of box' experience for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid there's simply nothing for Linux that will easily do what you want.
Multi-monitor - even with only 2 outputs - support is bad.. personal anecdote:
- Debian Wheezy with 3.9 kernel from Sid
- Lenovo 2011 era laptop (Thinkpad Edge E420)
-> when connecting both internal screen (LVDS) and to a beamer for presentations, if the output is set to beamer only and the VGA cable is removed, display will not be reset to LVDS only, making the laptop unusable
-> when connecting three displays (VGA + LVDS + HDMI), really bad things happen (outputs black) if the laptop goes to suspend..

Re:no good 'out of box' experience for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in my experience (10+ years Linux experience - 30 years Unix). I have been using dual displays with Linux (nVidia 8800GT video card) since 2007. I can run (using nVidia proprietary drivers) two full-screen HD (1080p) videos simultaneously without stutter (unless I have resource-intensive background processes going at the same time). I am currently running Scientific Linux 6.4 (a clone of RHEL 6.4) with the 2.6.32 kernel. Not even close to "state-of-the-art", but very efficient! Of course 8 3GHz cores helps! :-)

Re:no good 'out of box' experience for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Lenovo problem, their ACPI is ugly and full of malware

Why not a VM?

[starfire83]

If Linux is coming up short for multi-monitor support (especially 2+ on a single card), definitely plop Windows 7 on your box then run Linux in a VM using your choice of VirtualBox, VMWare Player, or Virtual PC. The only snag I can think of to that is that the VM may not be able to take advantage of your screen real estate if you need tools visible on more than one screen. At which point, you could always clone that VM and run other tools in that one if you have the hardware resources.

It's kind of surprising to me that in 2013 Linux is still having issues with more than two monitors running from a single card (which the NVS450 is capable of four total).

Re:Why not a VM?

[egr]

VMWare supports dual monitor on guest Linux OS just fine. I am unsure about three monitors however.

Re:Why not a VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

We routinely drive 4 30" monitors on Linux workstations using 2x nvidia cards and nvidia's proprietary drivers, as well as 2 xAMD cards and their open source drivers. Nvidia delivers more hw acceleration in a 4 monitor setup, but both work just fine. The idea of needing windows to do this is positively neandrathalic, and suggests an astroturphing motive on the part of the comment that preceeded yours.

Re:Why not a VM?

[ericloewe]

VirtualBox supports a lot of monitors with Linux guests, too. Can't vouch for how well it works, though, I only needed one monitor at once...

Re:Why not a VM?

[dbIII]

I'm getting the idea that the post is a troll since the nvidia drivers are just as capable on nearly every OS they are available for. It would surprise me if in 2003 linux was having issues with multi-monitor support on cards that are capable of it - I've still got some Matrox cards from then that were happily driving two screens at the time.

Re:Why not a VM?

[jones_supa]

I'm getting the idea that the post is a troll since the nvidia drivers are just as capable on nearly every OS they are available for.

No one would bother to craft a lame troll like that. I myself also found surprising that his setup was not supported properly, but I simply do not suspect that the post is a troll.

Re:Why not a VM?

[dbIII]

I've set up something functionally identical with much older quatro cards, and the very bottom end of quatro cards at that, so I doubt that the posters setup is not supported properly. The person using it was unfamiliar with linux but once I showed them the GUI tool they were fine with it over several changing combinations of monitors before it was finally installed in a truck with four monitors bolted to the wall. I'm pretty sure the monitors have been upgraded to larger ones in the two or three years since with no drama.
Thus to me it fails the bullshit test. I've been there, done that, and let it loose on someone without a lot of education or computer experience and they don't think it's hard. That makes me think the "engineer" didn't even try and is making shit up.
I've set up a couple of dozen dual or more screen systems since 2003 and it's rarely been difficult, even when mixing video cards from two different vendors (which sometimes doesn't work but when it does it isn't all that hard), so that's why I've confident in my opinion.

Re:Why not a VM?

[jones_supa]

That is possible.

2 video cards with twinview

[Anonymous Coward]

Get yourself a gamer motherboard that has two PCI-e slots, put two video cards that has two video ports out each, and you can have up to four monitors with full hardware acceleration.

Newer card, or newer distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Some newer kepler cards have >2 CRTC, probably some newer radeons too. If you want a multi card support use the most recent fedora or ubuntu, which have some support for this with the open source drivers, the secondary gpu wouldn't be used except to display, and will be slow since it will use system memory and tear badly, but it may work.

Re:Newer card, or newer distro

[dan_at_sqlite_org]

I have three HD screens running with 3d acceleration here. Slackware 14, XFCE, nvidia GT640, closed-source driver. Worked out of the box.

OSX?

[Anonymous Coward]

You like and need linux/unix, you want support for 3 monitors, you're thinking of running Windows but hate the idea. Did you think about OSX and home-brew for package installation?

any nvidia MDT device

[zeldor]

http://www.amazon.com/computers-accessories/dp/B0089WM7XE
with the nvidia drivers version 304 or newer.
Have 2 machines each with one of these cards. drives 3 monitors one of which is even in portrait mode.

Re:any nvidia MDT device

[starfire83]

The NVS450 has 4x DisplayPorts on it so he shouldn't need a new card to drive 3+ monitors from a single card.

Almost works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Nvidia GTX 680 and three HD monitors. Everything works great with Twinview as far as acceleration. My only issue is that I cannot get a window from Wine (or a game like Nexuiz) to be larger than one monitor. I can move the window so that it crosses two monitors, but it won't get larger than 1920x1080. I've asked in various forums about this, but have had no useful replies.

Run windows... with linux VMs

[HockeyPuck]

Use the right tools for the job.

You need three monitors which is easily supported by windows.

You need the linux based toolsets to also do your job.

So why not just run windows and fire up a linux VM to run your tools in?

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[serviscope_minor]

So why not just run windows and fire up a linux VM to run your tools in?

Because Linux does support it out of the box. I have no idea what the user has done, but me and many other posters find that the nvidia drivers support multiple accelerated monitors with no trouble whatsoever.

There seems to be some odd issue with his setup. This therefore seems to me more of a question for a slower, more persistent help problem where he can post debugging output and have some experts look at it.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never had that setup work by default on Linux. It always required an hour of fuckery until it worked. It does not support it out of the box at all, you need at least the proprietary driver to get something decent (as usual).

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[Anonymous Coward]

CentOS 6 supports three monitors plugged into the same nvidia board with the nouveau driver no problem.
I don't know what this thread is about.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[Adnonify]

Because nobody wants an unstable host system for their VM's. Get over it, windows sucks.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[msobkow]

Only an hour? Ah, I remember the good old days of spending an entire day getting the Xconfig files right for one monitor...

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[Anonymous Coward]

Unstable? Have you actually used windows in the past decade?

Get that fanboii crap out of here.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[MikeBabcock]

As far as I know, you can load as many NVidia cards into your box as you have PCIe slots to handle them and load those with as many monitors as they can handle and get full acceleration on all of them on Linux.

What you may not get is 2D acceleration which Windows got favoured with years ago by drivers that are OS specific.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[serviscope_minor]

What you may not get is 2D acceleration which Windows got favoured with years ago by drivers that are OS specific.

Seems unlikely. I remember getting solid 2D acceleration across 4 cards before. I think it was an unholy mix of 2 nvidia cards, a Savage 4 and a Matrox. All PCI.

I remember quite specifically, since the unaccelerated XFree86 drivers where risible and gave astonishingly poor scrolling perfomance. I remember an Acorn user mocking this in fact since RiscOS had amazing 2D performance in software by comparison.

I also remember XV acceleration spanning videos happily across the nvidia and Savage 4 card. I never tried with the Matrox since I ended up needing the PCI slot for other things quite quickly.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[dbIII]

To be frank I've had a lot of problems with MS Windows multi-monitor support (probably made worse by using multiple cards in the same box most of the time) but not a lot with linux over more than a decade. If you've used MS Windows much in that way you'll know what I mean - one monitor is dead or missing and stuff wants to display on dead air. Utterly stupid IMHO. Without the third party extra tools it's even more of a mess and it's like going back to before 2000.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[Kagetsuki]

Yes and it's unstable and awful. Go fuck yourself AC.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely this user has decided that he is too clever to run Ubuntu and so has installed something else which needs huge amounts of work before it will function correctly.

I run Debian

Yeah, thought so.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[Anonymous Coward]

But, as usual, Linux is late to the party. You fucks all shout down MS for innovation but MS had this implemented long before Linux and it Just Worked(tm).
 
Stupid Linux faggots... always trying to look like they're first class when this little OS is still back in the dark ages. Sure, the average Linux Luser knows their OS better than the average Windows user but that's only because you have to in order to get the same experience that Windows offers out of the box.
 
Keep telling us how great Linsux is, we'll keep laughing.
 
It's sad when a supposed Linsux Luser is pointing out that they don't know how to do something in their OS that Windows users have been doing natively for over a decade now.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[flyingfsck]

Only a day? Man, I can remember the fearsome black screen of death...

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I guess if you have nothing better to do than stay in your mum's basement all day and wank to cartoon ponies, mucking around with lunix for hours is a perfectly valid option.

Just please understand the rest of us with lives don't have time to spend 8 hours debugging multi-monitor support when it works flawlessly out of the box on windows. Not everyone has the time and patience to bring a substandard desktop os to near-modern standards.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[XcepticZP]

From a "twitter" user... Didn't know hipsters use linux.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[MikeBabcock]

Good to know. I've only done this with nvidia boards and never had problems myself. Just seems like an odd FUD post to hit slashdot at all.

Re:Run windows... with linux VMs

[Anonymous Coward]

Every post here that mentions the x config file is further proof that X needs to go.

Go with NVIDIA

[bongey]

After weeks of trying to get AMD/Gigabyte motherboard and video card to drive 4 displays on linux, it just didn't work.
Tried 3 different distros, god knows how many xorg confs and driver combinations.
In the end I broke down and bought a NVIDIA GTX 760 for the following reasons.
*Drive 4 displays in Linux no problem with HW Acceleration.
*4 displays can be driven at 1920x1080.
*OpenCV has Cuda support , nothing for OpenCL yet.
*Openscenegraph has Cuda library, nothing for OpenCL yet.
*The Nvidia settings manager actually works.
*Xrandr is is working correctly.

I am happy now, it just worked. I want to tell NVIDIA **** you also about the linux/drivers /open source issue but there shit is just working and I will pay for working linux driver.

Re: Go with NVIDIA

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a solution, I have a 3gig nvidia card on a asus g75vx and i can't get 2 monitor working or even one 30 inches 2560x1600p

Re: Go with NVIDIA

[denis.b.bergeron]

Not a solution, I have a 3gig nvidia card on a asus g75vx and i can't get 2 monitor working or even one 30 inches 2560x1600p

Re:Go with NVIDIA

[sl149q]

I tried to upgrade to Linux Mint 14 in January using an Radeon Card. Could not get multi-monitor to work.

Ended up back with Nvidia and it works. Four monitors, just use the nvidia drivers and nvidia settings applet.

I have subsequently upgraded the MB to a Z87 based system so am now trying to attach two monitors to the MB video as well. For those I want to have a second keyboard / mouse and run a different window manager.

There's something missing.

[jimicus]

Where are all the Linux advocates who jump out and say "Why would you want to do that? You must be some special kind of moron to need that in the first place" when you ask a genuine question about something that is trivial on every other OS out there but a royal PITA on Linux?

Re:There's something missing.

[iggymanz]

many people do this (and with more than three monitors) on Linux, just a matter of the right card and driver; you're imaging a massive response to the non-issue you fabricated between your ears?

Re:There's something missing.

[jimicus]

just a matter of the right card and driver

I specifically said "trivial" for a reason. If I have to hunt out a particular model of graphics card (which may or may not still be on the market by the time someone who's had some success reports it in a public forum, I identify the need for it and go looking), then it's not trivial.

Re:There's something missing.

[serviscope_minor]

If I have to hunt out a particular model of graphics card

Yeah, very hard. The model is called an "nvidia".

Re:There's something missing.

[starfire83]

The point is, on other OSes you don't need a "right" card or "right" driver to do something as simple as multiple monitors driven from one card. Two monitors is fairly standard for one card pre-Radeon 5000 series and pre-GeForce 600 series. Now both vendors support driving 3+ monitors from a single card or in SLI/CFX for many more. All it should take is installing the most current driver for the card to get the monitors up and working properly.

Re:There's something missing.

[Kagetsuki]

I'm using two completely different nVidia boards to drive 3 monitors, one of which happens to be a 3D monitor (which is why I have two cards to begin with, needed a newer card for 3D monitor support). It was extremely simple to set up. In fact I can't even remember having to do anything other than plug in the cards an monitor, I don't think I ever opened up the nvidia control panel tool to configure it.

Re:There's something missing.

[iggymanz]

actually, as computer dept. found at work with my Mac, you might indeed need to do some research as driver might not work on one's "one behind current version" OS

that said, trivial to find working combination, I'm amazed some people are afraid they'll break a nail doing 120 seconds "research" on the net

Matrox

[rkoot]

I'd say, ditch the nvidia setup and acquire a matrox video board. http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/ Linux supports matrox boards very nicely with all bells and whistles. Especially if you're only interested in hw accell 2d.

Re:Matrox

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no FOSS drivers for semi-recent (never than G450) Matrox cards; while a non-free driver existed some time ago, it was absolutely horrible and I doubt it'll still exist. That said, 3d capabilities (which the author mentioned as requirement) for any Matrox card is close to non-existant.

Re:Matrox

[Anonymous Coward]

Who says the driver has to be FOSS?

AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

Get an AMD card... the multi-monitor support is great on Linux with their proprietary driver. I used a FirePro V4900 to drive 4 monitors for a while (but it has relatively poor 3D performance) and recently upgraded to a FirePro W7000 which has support for up to 6 (4 DisplayPort outputs which you can daisy-chain with monitor/hub support). While my experience has been mostly with the FirePro series, I think the consumer cards are just as good in this department.

I just used

[mocm]

the nvidia-settings tool to set up 4 monitors on my GTX670, there is no problem with speed and I get hw accelerated 3d on every screen. The driver is NVidia's 310.19. I used the TwinView Option on the Layout selection screen and could put the monitors into the wanted configuration with the GUI. I can move windows between the monitors and xfce gives me panels on the separate monitors.
The screen section in the xorg.conf looks like this:
Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device "Device0"
        Monitor "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth 24
        Option "TwinView" "0"
        Option "Stereo" "0"
        Option "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0"
        Option "metamodes" "DFP-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DFP-1: 1920x1200 +1920+1080, DFP-3: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0, DFP-4: nvidia-auto-select +0+1080; DFP-1: 1920x1200 +0+0; DFP-1: 1920x1200 +0+0"
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth 24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

and the server layout:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier "Layout0"
        Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
        InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        Option "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Re:I just used

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not 1995 - I remember fiddling with X config files to get the best out of my Matrox 2 Millennium (?) card, and a Cirrus Logic card before then. That was excusable back then, but not today.

Re:I just used

[Anonymous Coward]

mocm wrote: "I just used ..." (= subject) "...the nvidia-settings tool to set up 4 monitors" (= first part of the post)
In other words, fiddling with X config files isn't necessary.
It's not 1995, you could've learned to read in the past 18 years.
If the anonymous reader who posted the question to Ask Slashdot, for whatever reason, is unable to make nvidia-settings do what (s)he wants, _then_ the configuration that mocm pasted can be used for xorg.conf.

Re:I just used

[Anonymous Coward]

You're so right. Hacking the registry is just so much more avant garde.

Re:I just used

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you get compositing working with that?

My x.conf specifically disables it. I tried enabling it, and the only thing that achieves is it will clone one screen to all three monitors :(

Re:I just used

[hedwards]

For a basic multimonitor set up, you don't have to. But, you're really limiting the things you can do if you don't bother. Things like virtual multi-monitor on the same monitor and various other ways that you can combine one or more monitors.

They've got a ton of stuff in there if you bother to learn to use it. In practice though, typical set ups are automatically generated.

AMD/ATI isn't as bad as it used to be

[Anonymous Coward]

My Ubuntu workstation has an HD 7950, using proprietary drivers installed from the Settings menu. Currently running three 1080p monitors, two of which are rotated portrait mode. Any HD 7xxx series card is supposed to be able to run up to six monitors, though you usually only get four outputs (six requires monitors that support DisplayPort daisy-chaining).

Oh, and I occasionally play DotA 2 on Steam for Linux on this as well. Apart from trying to start on the wrong monitor, it works very well.

Re:AMD/ATI isn't as bad as it used to be

[rrohbeck]

Two non-DP plus all DP outputs simultaneously is the rule. There are cards with up to six DP outputs.

Get a Mac, it just works ...

[perpenso]

Get a Mac. Are you sure your toolset is Linux specific? Odds are your apps and tools run fine under Mac OS X. Some info from Apple:
http://movies.apple.com/media/us/osx/2012/docs//OSX_for_UNIX_Users_TB_July2011.pdf

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it doesn't just work. I have a very nice triple monitor Mac setup. Besides the obvious price issue, here are my two major complaints (there are other more nitpicky ones I won't get into).

1. Sound. I had to download a third-party app called Soundflower to get the sound to work the way I want. (Actually, the way I want is for the sound of the app on a given monitor to come from that monitor's speaker, but that's asking for unicorns so I just settled for using left and right monitors for stereo.)
2. Fullscreen. Fullscreening any app on a monitor blanks out the other two monitors.

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[timeOday]

MacBooks can't even drive 3 displays, and nobody would buy a Mac Pro right now. If starting over, waiting a few months, and spending well over $10K is an option, the new round Mac Pro with three 4k displays would make an awesome workstation. But otherwise I think just installing the NVidia driver on his existing setup will fix the problem he has.

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[ericloewe]

The new round Mac Pro is an absurd product, as has been amply discussed.

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[Anonymous Coward]

2. Fullscreen. Fullscreening any app on a monitor blanks out the other two monitors.

You'll be pleased to know that apple announced that fixing this is one of the major new features of Mavericks.

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[Midnight_Falcon]

build a hackintosh. for $1k-$3k you can have 4 monitor support and OS X :)

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[timeOday]

It is strange that there are no hard drive bays. But with so much fast external connectivity (via Thunderbolt 2), it won't be a dealbreaker IF the requisite Thunderbolt 2 peripherals are actually available. I got an early Thunderbolt MacBook Pro and have been very disappointed with the lack of compatible peripherals. I still plug in 7 different connecters when I arrive at work every morning.

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[perpenso]

MacBooks can't even drive 3 displays, and nobody would buy a Mac Pro right now.

I believe the 27" iMac with Thunderbolt supports two external displays. With the built-in that is three displays.

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[bartoku]

The MacBook Pro Retina 15" can drive 3 external monitors.
I regularly have two 2560x1440 cinema displays through the thunderbolt/displayports and a 1920x1200 monitor through the HDMI port.

I wanted more though, and for less than $2K you can get a powerful multi-monitor Mac setup today.
With the hope of improved multi-monitor support in Mavericks and the 2013 Mac Pro months away and disappointing I bought a Mac Pro.
Got a good deal on eBay for a used Mac Pro 2009.
Two ATI Radeon HD 5770 and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 give me 8 displays in OS X.
I was hoping I could use my AMD FirePro W600 given the new Mac Pro will be using a variant of that GPU line, but could not get it to work in OSX.

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[Draconix]

It just works until your video card dies and you have to pay out the ass for a new one, or go the risky route of flashing the ROM of a PC video card. I used to be a long-time Mac user, but I switched to Linux after I got sick of Apple's overpriced hardware and propensity for screwing over pro users with hardware that can't be upgraded past a certain point. (I had a first-gen Mac Pro, which despite having a 64 bit CPU had 32 bit EFI firmware and the generation of PCIe that was already obsolete when the Mac Pro came out, so I was stuck with crap for video card options and it can't run OS 10.8 or later.)

Now that I've been using Linux for a while, I wish I'd switched a long time ago. Sure, I run into problems a bit more often than I did on Mac, but they're usually an awful lot easier to fix than Mac or Windows issues. (Especially Windows, and I work as a PC repair technician!) I've gotten so accustomed to the features and customization of KDE that even OS X--which I used happily from the time it came out to 10.7--feels too limiting.

Re: Get a Mac, it just works ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run a windows 7 laptop with two external displays. I recently upgraded to the 15" retina macbook pro and now I run 4 displays: two via thunderbolt to dvi adapters, one via hdmi, and the laptop's built in retina display.

It "just works", every time, and OSX remembers the display layout perfectly, no futzing about like I had to do with win7.

I was a bit annoyed with the full screen behavior, but I bought divvy and never looked back... For me, this setup beats win7 hands down. Is it expensive? Sure, but I'm more productive than I was with win7 alone (I still run visio and Ms project in a win7 vm with vmware fusion).

I really love this setup. If apple would have offered a 13" rMBP with two thunderbolt ports and an hdmi port, I probably would have opted for that (using the 15" sucks on a plane, which I do a LOT). However, it was a worthy compromise to be more productive when I'm in the office.

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[not flu]

I'd be pleased if Apple removed their absolutely painful fullscreen crap. All programs that benefited from fullscreen mode already had it before 10.8 and it worked much better. I keep using old versions of select programs because they use the old style fullscreening instead of the new motion-sickness inducing crap where you can't even float windows over fullscreened apps anymore. I stopped using browsers in fullscreen mode just because using old versions that actually work properly is a security risk!

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[gagol]

I still plug in 7 different connecters when I arrive at work every morning.

1st, learn to spell connector, 2nd, If that is a problem for you, 98% of the world envy you. I hope you realize it.

Re:Get a Mac, it just works ...

[timeOday]

Oh, don't worry, I have bigger problems too. That's why I come to relax by dickering about computers on /.

Was simple for me with Nvidia

[Agent ME]

I feel like I'm missing something; this was dirt-simple for me.

I used to have a computer with an Nvidia card. I had Ubuntu on it. I had the Nvidia drivers installed. I had the nvidia-settings utility installed (which for some reason wasn't included by default). I plugged in the extra monitors. I opened nvidia-settings. I clicked "Detect Monitors". I enabled them. Suddenly I had several monitors without having to touch a single config file.

Re:Was simple for me with Nvidia

[Anonymous Coward]

So you have more than 2 monitors plugged in at the same time?

Can you get a compositor running? I can't... Can you post your X conf file please?

Re:Was simple for me with Nvidia

[Anonymous Coward]

Section "Device"
Identifier "Default Device"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
Option "TwinView" "True"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
EndSection

That's with an nVidia GeForce 8600 GT. Two monitor, compiz runs fine.

AMD/ATI?

[Just Brew It!]

Until a few months ago at work I was running triple-head on an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS desktop with an ATI Radeon something-or-other card. Hardware acceleration was supported. The third head was analog, but AFAIK that was just a limitation of the sub-$150 graphics card I was using (only 2 digital ports), not something inherent in X or the drivers. I was surprised to discover that triple head was even possible with an inexpensive card.

I did need to install a beta version of the proprietary drivers, and IIRC it took a bit of finagling with xrandr in a startup script to get the heads to consistently come up in the correct order (stupid Catalyst Control Center!), but once I got those issues sorted it worked reasonably well.

as often the user is the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=twinview+four+displays – and well, you see, that you should be fine if you buy a new graphics card which supports more than 2 3d-accelerated displays and has equivalent performance. instead you flame citing linux as being so "90s", complaining that your _2D_ quadro card isn't fast enough. You could call up nvidia and tell them – maybe they will send you something better suited (quadro 6000) or they'll just laugh at you...

Re:as often the user is the problem

[dbIII]

Or the answer is to do what I did with a machine where people insisted on quadro cards - just put in two of them if you can't hook up more than two screens on one card.

Re:as often the user is the problem

[starfire83]

NVS450 has 4x DisplayPort and can easily drive those four monitors.

Re:as often the user is the problem

[nullchar]

You have 3-4 monitors working with hardware acceleration without using Xinerama or TwinView?

I have 2x Quadros running with Xinerama - one monitor has hardware accelerated 3D graphics, but a 3D application cannot span nor cross a monitor boundary.

Radeon HD FTW!

[dj.delorie]

I've got four monitors (one is 2560x1600) on a single Radeon HD 6870 and it does everything you want. Running Fedora 17 with the proprietary ATI drivers, FVWM2, with a single desktop and 3D hardware acceleration. I tested F19 with Gnome and free drivers too.

full screen terminals!

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing will be faster.
If you need windowing, check out emacs!

I've run 3 windows on UNIX before, but each had a dedicated graphics card, hence a dedicated X/Windows server. That means that drag-n-drop between the monitors was not possible.

There are display-sharing tools that work on all 3 main platforms, but I don't know how fast they are.

I'd look into what the airplane simulator crowd uses as a starting point. I've seen 6 monitor setups and the Linux simulators are top-of-the-line.

You are mistaken

[Anonymous Coward]

You get the best of everything by running Linux inside a VM on OSX, if not using the underlying Unixness.

I know nothing about linux

[NEDHead]

But if more than 2 monitors is the issue, why not get 2 of the latest really big/high res ones and stop whining?

Re:I know nothing about linux

[hedwards]

Yeah, really. If he needs 3 different desktops, you can always split the monitors in multiple parts using virtual servers, IIRC. For some things I find that's better. Especially with these long 16:10 monitors where they're generally too long for things like reading web pages.

Simple, forget the kiddie cards, go displayport

[SmallFurryCreature]

The biggest issue is that everything but displayport sucks donkeyballs. So get a firepro card from AMD with 6 display ports and run it with the linux native driver. Works fine for me. I use XFCE myself with such a setup with 3x 2560x1600. I have tried to do it with HDMI and such but run into all kinds of weird issues where displayport just works right every time.

I am to lazy to search for mine but it isn't even a 3D card so it was pretty cheap and fits in any PC (no extra power needed). If you want 3D you are going to run into driver issues on Linux but AMD's work station cards can do the trick if you can afford them.

Re:Simple, forget the kiddie cards, go displayport

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my god. You have just solved it. That is amazing. Thank you for the heads up, now I see the future of video cards.

Re:Simple, forget the kiddie cards, go displayport

[serviscope_minor]

I use XFCE myself with such a setup with 3x 2560x1600.

Holy crap you have a big desk!

Out of interest since you mention anything but DP sucking, do you use the cheapie no-name IPS monitors which require a powered DP to dual-lnik DVI converter or do you use more expensive ones which take in DP directly?

Re:Simple, forget the kiddie cards, go displayport

[starfire83]

NVS450 drives 4x DisplayPort.

Re:Simple, forget the kiddie cards, go displayport

[rrohbeck]

There are also PowerColor Radeon cards with up to 6 DP outputs.

nVidia artificially restrict their driver on Linux

[Timmmm]

This is worth a read:

http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippling-from-nvidia-graphics-card/

It seems nVidia restrict you to two monitors on Linux whereas you can happily use three on Windows. I have no idea why other than that they are clearly bastards.

Is this for real or to pretend there is a flaw?

[dbIII]

The posters question is answered the exact same way on MS Windows or linux, hardware that supports the number of screens desired and a driver downloaded from the hardware vendor. Whether it's two low end cards to do four screens or it's one relatively high end (as in more than $100 instead of dirt cheap) card that's what will do the trick. I've done it with both ways with no problems on linux and only a few problems on MS Windows with two cards (limited options for cloned screens, so normally not a big deal).
The post looks to me like a windows fanboy trying to score points by writing about a flaw that isn't there, but maybe it really is someone that got some bad advice about twinview or made an assumption based on the name. Considering how multi-monitor behavior on MS Windows still sucks I find it a bit much if it is a fanboy post. Matrox handled it better with their tool on Win2k than Microsoft does with Win7. Having to reboot to get the correct monitor resolution on a DVI connection is ridiculous - the guys writing the VGA part of the resolution tool got it right so why not the other programmers and where the fuck where the guys that were supposed to test the software before release?

Re:Is this for real or to pretend there is a flaw?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok then, can you give me the correct information on Twinview?

I'm running the latest nVidia binary drivers I can get. (304.88) on 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.46-1 x86_64 GNU/Linux.

I may be misinformed but I'm not a troll. If you can fix my issue I will be in your debt!

Re:Is this for real or to pretend there is a flaw?

[dbIII]

Just use the gui tool and it will generate a config that works so long as the hardware can do it, and that includes multiple cards of differing specs back to about five years old. The current gui tool will even let you do different rotations, which was something missing from an older tool.
Sorry, but this is something that has been so easy for several years that I find it difficult to believe that you have tried it before posting. Just try it and you'll see how easy it is.

ATi + Debian

[Alioth]

At work I have a multimonitor setup running Debian 7 / Gnome 3. Works perfectly. I'm using an ATi graphics card (can't remember the model) and the proprietary drivers, it's accelerated and works very well. Setup was very straightforward - run the setup for the ATi drivers, then select in the GUI how you want your displays.

FVWM pager?

[gweihir]

I am not happy if I do not have at least 6, better 9 virtual desktops with quick switching. The FVWM pager gives you customizable edge-scroll, easy dragging of windows between desktops, multi-desktop spanning windows, etc. One reason Linux does not have multi-monitor out of the box is that it is almost never needed, different from Windows, where one cluttered desktop is the norm.

Re:FVWM pager?

[serviscope_minor]

Huh?

Linux supports multimonitor out of the box very well, and I say this as a die-hard FVWM user. This small-screened laptop has 30 (3x10) panels in the pager btw.

Problem with FVWM though is it doesn't respond to xrandr events which means that when you change the monitor setup, none of the windows line up any more, if you use the pager in large-virtual-desktop mode as opposed to disjoint desktop mode.

Still, it works fine with xinerama geometries.

Re:FVWM pager?

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the combination of virtual desktops and multiple monitors that I currently get with xfce and a dual-screen setup. When I login, I have one monitor as display/screen :0.0 and two monitors ganged together as display/screen :0.1. Screen 1 is tiled across the two monitors so I can drag windows between them or resize one window to cover both monitors. I cannot drag windows between the screens 0 and 1, but I can move the mouse between them to direct focus. I can launch windows on the correct screen by using menus there or by setting the DISPLAY environment in a command-line interaction.

The hot-key virtual desktop switching works in whichever screen has focus, so I can navigate screen 0 in its own 2x2 grid of desktops independently of which desktop is showing on screen 1, and vice versa. This setup is really useful for running basic email/messaging and system tools on screen 0 desktops and my development and content tools on the screen 1 desktops. I can easily cross-reference development materials while composing emails, etc., and cut-paste works between the screens.

Eyefinity

[hawkeyeMI]

Just get a Radeon Eyefinity model, with 4-6 mini-DisplayPorts on it. Works great. Been running like this in Debian with 4 monitors for years now using fglrx drivers.

Re:Eyefinity

[hawkeyeMI]

Here's an example: http://www.amazon.com/VisionTek-Products-Express-Graphics-900614/dp/B00C7EPSVS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1374945238&sr=8-2&keywords=eyefinity+6

Re:Eyefinity

[hawkeyeMI]

And here you can see it in action. I use i3wm. Works great. http://blog.brocktice.com/2013/05/29/new-treadmill-treadmill-desk-setup/

Re:Eyefinity

[rrohbeck]

If only fglrx was reliable. It crashes 100% with KDE - the bugs were submitted several months ago.

Re:Eyefinity

[Anonymous Coward]

+1. I used to run 2x NVIDIAs (GTX275 + GT240) with the same problem that faces the OP up until about 12 months ago. I bit the bullet and went AMD:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Cape Verde PRO [Radeon HD 7750]
01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Cape Verde/Pitcairn HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 7700/7800 Series]

Running on Ubuntu 13.04, Catalyst 12.9 I have been pleasantly suprised that it just works. Configurable via the supplied GUI.

Re:Eyefinity

[hawkeyeMI]

I can't speak to KDE, but it's been fine in i3wm and Gnome for me.

Re:huh? but this is working for at least 3 years n

[MikeBabcock]

Works out of the box for me too on an NVidia based card running dual screens.

Hardware solution

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems easy. Just get one of the Matrox TripleHead2Go:
http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/gxm/th2go/displayport/

Why multiple monitors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, why more than one 19" - 27"ish monitor when a single 32" would spare you the borders of the smaller screens?

Re:Why multiple monitors?

[hawkeyeMI]

I find it more convenient to have separate monitors, saves trouble partitioning a single large monitor all the time (unless you use a tiling wm).

x2x helps

[Anonymous Coward]

One simple solution is to run two X-servers (one per card), and then connect between them with X2X (to share mouse, keyboard, and clipboard). I run KDE on my main pair of screens, and Razor on the 3rd. It's a bit of a pain having to launch the window on the Xserver you need, but not a serious problem.

Let's hear about more than yourself

[dbIII]

It's trivial on linux as well if the hardware can do it, and the GUI tool to set it up looks just like the MS Windows one. Your "royal PITA on Linux" is just telling us you have an axe to grind and are willing to bring it out over a non-issue.

Re:Let's hear about more than yourself

[jimicus]

Not if you want half-decent performance it's not, which is precisely what this post is all about.

Re:Let's hear about more than yourself

[dbIII]

Actually no, since the nvidia drivers perform about the same on every platform they are available for. Please do something more helpful than showing people that you feel strongly enough that you are prepared to lie for what is really a trivial issue. Are you are a person that has a desire to damage the reputation of the business that you have linked to in your signature or did you forget about the link before posting such a silly and obvious lie?

Re:Let's hear about more than yourself

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Re:Let's hear about more than yourself

[dbIII]

I do know, and if you spent a few minutes reading the release notes from the vendor you would also know.

Euh, no?

[dutchwhizzman]

I have a Radeon 7850 with 2 dual link DVI ports and a displayport. It won't allow more than one DVI output to run dual-link resolutions. I doubt *three* monitors like this guys asks for will work if two won't even work.... Mind you, his current Nvidia board will do it just fine, but ATI is severly limited when it comes to proper resolutions on non-displayport screens.

Re:Euh, no?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have enough PHYs, so it is tying two PHYs+CRTCs to drive a single dual-link DVI port. It is not a problem of the GPU or even the driver, it is your video card that decided to set things up that way. You can drive three dual-DVI monitors from a Radeon 78xx, but the video board has to be designed that way.

Re:Euh, no?

[rrohbeck]

7850 has one dual-link and one single-link DVI output. There are no 7850s with two dual-link DVI outputs (except somebody might integrate an active DP->DVI converter chip.).

GCN allows two non-DP outputs plus all DP outputs to run in parallel. I run three Korean 2560x1440 on the dual-link DVI and the two DP outputs on my 7850, plus one 1920x1080 on HDMI. This is supported by fglrx (sucks; crashy) and by the latest kernel/driver code but the only distro that has it today is Fedora 19. Ubuntu saucy should have it too but it doesn't work yet - at least not when I tried it two weeks ago.

Easy: buy a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Or install gentoo.

Re:Easy: buy a Mac

[meustrus]

Mac or gentoo? Hm...what a strange suggestion. Buy an expensive system where (almost) everything will work right away, but you're fucked if you want to do something not preordained? Or build a system where you can do literally anything you want...but it won't boot right until you've fucked with it for a week? Choices, choices...

Too bad there's no middle ground, huh?

Re:Easy: buy a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

The only Macs that can run more than 2 monitors are hilariously overpriced. You could build a kick-ass Linux PC, buy several very nice monitors, and still have money left over.

Rewording to avoid a kneejerk

[dbIII]

I meant "I'm getting the idea that the article summary posted is a troll". The word "post" is not meant to refer to the above post by starfire83, but the AC that is making some incorrect assumptions.

Download the driver

[dbIII]

Get the one from Nvidia and you'll get that acceleration. It's both 3D and 2D.

You need GUI toolkits to provide a layer of higher-level acceleration API to support the acceleration API in X-window and make use of it

What do you think compiz, kde, gnome, enlightenment etc have been doing for the last decade?

Re:Download the driver

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think compiz, kde, gnome, enlightenment etc have been doing for the last decade?

By default: drag performance down the gutter and kick it with shiny boots while its down trying to recover from the eye candy overdose.

Once effects are disabled: provided a more or less nice abstraction layer.

I disable the eye candy on every PC I have to work with, on current systems it doubles the frame rate and fixes randomly appearing lags, on older, less powerful systems it makes the experience smooth

Re:Download the driver

[jones_supa]

It's honestly sad that is like that in Linux. Hell, it used to be the OS that used to be much more lightweight than Windows. And here I am typing this on a AMD C-60 -based 10.1" netbook on Windows 7, with DWM and Aero with all effects enabled. No performance problems and window animations are butter smooth. With a netbook under Linux, even the stupid window minimize zoom animation is jerky. To get the Windoze-like performance, you have to go all way down to some humble XFCE or LXDE setup with no modern-day effects. I hope this all will be sorted out in the future with Wayland or Mir helping with things. I mean, you don't have to fill you desktop with wobbly windows and stardust but a little bit of eye candy and with compositing is nice to have and is clearly not technically impossible even on lightweight hardware.

Re:Download the driver

[dbIII]

It's done on phones FFS with enlightenment 17 - how's that for lightweight?

Re:Download the driver

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you think compiz, kde, gnome, enlightenment etc have been doing for the last decade?

They do the compositing of windows and that part of acceleration is perfect.

But they cover only the acceleration of windows. What about things inside each window? I mean the text rendering, antialiasing, drawing of lines and rectangles, blending, animations, etc, etc. Acceleration could be applied everywhere. An example of such on windows is to use gfx shaders inside windows WPF/Silverlight to perform blurring or tiling of images - while they're nothing special, it's miles faster to do them by shaders than by CPU.

The full capability of your gfx card can do much more than funny or cool effects. I didn't buy my card to use only 10% of its power.

Re:Download the driver

[dbIII]

There's stuff such as evas from enlightenment to give you a hardware accelerated canvas inside your application, Qt I think has something too and I'm pretty sure I've heard something about it in gtk - plus there's lower level stuff from an X extension.

ATI Drivers, Run all 3 monitors off 1 card

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey,

I know your pain, I used to hack a 3d accelerated desktop between two nvidias using some xserver packages that hadn't been worked on since 2002.

ATI finally got their crap together (only took serveral years) and you can run Eyefinity w/ 3D acceleration. I am typing this on a Debian system w/ 4960x1600 combined desktop and PLP. Learn more here : http://superuser.com/questions/95884/ati-eyefinity-under-linux (If you read down you can see a link to the initial discussion w/ ATI developers RE: drivers when these Eyefinity cards were close to launch. (ATI had promised Linux support pre-launch)

Setup in Debian takes 10-15 minutes using the drivers from ATI's site, make sure you are running Wheezy.

Best of luck.

yes it can. *nix for graphics = Mac

[raymorris]

My MacBook most certainly does drive three displays. My Mac Pro drives four, is quad-core with 16 GB RAM, and is almost five years old. I bet one a couple years old, like mine, could be bought for a couple hundred bucks.

I used Linux exclusively for fifteen years. I contributed to the kernel. When the boss put me on a Mac, I was surprised to discover how familiar it felt. I can use it just like Linux, with exactly the same workflow. The main difference is the cost of a Mac buys you nice hardware that "just works", and works very well. Mac has of course always been THE system for graphic design and publishing, so the display system is well done.

Re:yes it can. *nix for graphics = Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you need any assistance to pull Steve Jobs dick out of your ass?

What a fucking liar.

Re:yes it can. *nix for graphics = Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, the GP have no life, let him keep what he think he have.

So 2009. ATI

[mtippett]

3 head ati cards are easy to come by.

In 2009, we did 24 displays on on PC. Each 3x2 quadrant is randr based. That is what you want.

Http://youtube.com/watch?v=N6Vf8R_gOec

Re:nVidia artificially restrict their driver on Li

[mikechant]

It seems nVidia restrict you to two monitors on Linux whereas you can happily use three on Windows. I have no idea why other than that they are clearly bastards.

The most logical explanation is that the 3 monitor support didn't work on Linux and that they couldn't justify spending the money to debug this problem, given that the number of people using that particular card, and running Linux, and using 3 monitors, was probably only a handful.

Year of the Linux desktop!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Linux will never be mainstream. "Just edit your config files". Where the OP could install Windows and not have to fuck around with settings and put up with things that don't work as expected. This is why I gave up on Linux a while ago. I was submitting patches for Wine that were almost always rejected because it interfered with some hack the Codeweavers implemented for their own gain. No compromise was ever pursued. It's all a giant patchwork of barely working hobby projects. It saddens me, because of the potential it could have.

Re:Year of the Linux desktop!

[SeaFox]

This is why Linux will never be mainstream.

Yeah, because running three monitors at once is so mainstream. :rolleyes:

Re:Year of the Linux desktop!

[Anonymous Coward]

yes it is, walk into any engineering office, you will see some percision laptops and 3-4 23-32 inch monitors on everyone's desk

Re:Year of the Linux desktop!

[Anonymous Coward]

nvidia can control with their proprietary driver whether linux will "never" be mainstream?

Annoying, but workable

[Captain Damnit]

What the OP wants is perfectly possible. I'm typing this on an Ubuntu 12.04 box running the most recent Catalyst driver, and connected to three 1920x1080 monitors. Two are DVI, one is via a DisplayPort->DVI adapter. Video card is an older Radeon 6950. It works, more or less without issue, for what I do: coding in Eclipse, browsing the Internet, etc.

Using the open-source driver works for triple monitors, but the power management is not up to snuff in the open-source driver, and the fan on the video card gets annoyingly loud after a few minutes. This is the only reason I run the closed-source driver. Strangely video playback is smoother with the open-source driver in the triple monitor scenario.

Contrary to popular myths, you do not have to edit a config file for either closed or open-source drivers to enable magical triple monitor goodness. Both were able to detect and orient the monitors using either the Ubuntu monitor control panel or the Catalyst Control Center.

Things that don't work as well: video playback and 3D games. Video will get choppy full-screen if tear-free mode is enabled, and the tearing is intolerable when it's not. Likewise, performance for 3D games across 5760x1080 is iffy. I have a laptop for gaming and an HTPC for the video stuff, so it's not a deal-breaker for me. The OP did not specify what kind of engineering he/she does (circuit design? CAD? software?), so the 3D performance may well be an issue depending on the tools being used.

I have tried the Nvidia route several times, but always came away frustrated. AMD cards Just Worked for this application. Google 'Linus Torvalds middle finger' for a more complete technical discussion of why this is.

Getting a reliable triple monitor setup on Windows or Mac is much easier than in Linux, but most that experience can be chalked up to X. In theory, Wayland or Mir will handle this much better, but no stable distro uses them by default, and none of the high-level toolkits have mature support for it.

Re:huh? but this is working for at least 3 years n

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here.
I have a setup with one Radeon HD6670 card running three 27" displays (1 DVI, 1 Displayport, and 1 HDMI), and it worked out of the box on the latest Mint Linux with proprietary drivers.

Not so big after all

[SmallFurryCreature]

The monitors are on their side, so they are really 1600x2560. On their side they are 45cm each. It gives me a desktop where I can code long pages in the center screen and have debug and info to the left and right at eye level and info displays I need only occasionally at the top and bottom.

I have several generations of Dell monitors, U3011 and U3014. They have direct displayport. I have tried it with converter cables and it is a nightmare with having to edit x config files. The moment I switched over to pure display port, everything just worked.

The problem with multi-monitor setup, especially big ones is that on most normal video cards, the DVI outputs are often not equal. Typically one dual and one analog. And analog doesn't do a good job of telling your video card the capabilities of your screen.

Also since you need at least dual DVI to power a high rez screen, even if you have a Titan, it still can't power three screens because it simply lacks the outputs. There are some game video cards out there with multiple display ports but they are hard to find. The firepro series has several with either 4 or 6 DP ports.

When I found I didn't need to input timing information in x config anymore, I never went back.

Re:Not so big after all

[serviscope_minor]

The monitors are on their side, so they are really 1600x2560.

Interesting setup. I should try it some time.

I have several generations of Dell monitors, U3011 and U3014. They have direct displayport. I have tried it with converter cables and it is a nightmare with having to edit x config files. The moment I switched over to pure display port, everything just worked.

Converter from what to what? I was specifically wondering about DP to DVI, since the DVI only monitors are substantially cheaper than the Dell ones even including the cost of the active DP adapter. I'd probably go for the Dell monitors if I could afford them due to the exta flexibility of all the connection options.

The problem with multi-monitor setup, especially big ones is that on most normal video cards, the DVI outputs are often not equal. Typically one dual and one analog. And analog doesn't do a good job of telling your video card the capabilities of your screen.

That's interesting. I thought VGA used the same i2c connection as DVI. That said, I've got a monitor which sends bad packets and would only connect at 640x480 without hackery. That was going from laptop DP to DVI dual link to the monitor, though.

Re:Not so big after all

[Anonymous Coward]

The monitors are on their side

I'm guessing they're CRT monitors? LCD monitors look like crap when they're rotated 90 degrees.

Re:Not so big after all

[rrohbeck]

The monitors are on their side, so they are really 1600x2560.

Interesting setup. I should try it some time.

$30 VESA monitor mounts from Monoprice FTW.

Re:Not so big after all

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost no one turns a CRT sideways.

Re:Not so big after all

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Don't buy sucky TN panels.
2. ???
3. Profit!

Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can he be an 'engineer' and only have ever used windows?
Most engineers I know know all this stuff and use linux
more than windows/DOS.....

Could be an age thing I guess.

Re:Engineer?

[Anonymous Coward]

He might be a mechanical engineer? An electrical engineer? Nowhere did it state he's a s/w engineer...

No, 2D *is* hardware accelerated

[Anonymous Coward]

This log snippet is an *old* ATi Radeon 4770, running on the FLOSS (open, free) drivers (in a Debian Wheezy box with the latest 3.9 kernel):

Looks like EXA is enabled (2D acceleration), and that it is hardware-based, and that the radeon driver specifically notes that RENDER is being hardware accelerated, as well as the primitives that are actually used nowadays for 2d (nobody is drawing lines and circles anymore, the toolkits submit entire pixmaps).

[ 22.259] (II) RADEON(0): Direct rendering enabled
[ 22.260] (II) RADEON(0): Setting EXA maxPitchBytes
[ 22.260] (II) EXA(0): Driver allocated offscreen pixmaps
[ 22.260] (II) EXA(0): Driver registered support for the following operations:
[ 22.260] (II) Solid
[ 22.260] (II) Copy
[ 22.260] (II) Composite (RENDER acceleration)
[ 22.260] (II) UploadToScreen
[ 22.260] (II) DownloadFromScreen
[ 22.260] (II) RADEON(0): Acceleration enabled
[ 22.261] (II) RADEON(0): Set up textured video
[ 22.261] (II) RADEON(0): [XvMC] Associated with Radeon Textured Video.
[ 22.261] (II) RADEON(0): [XvMC] Extension initialized.
[ 22.261] (II) RADEON(0): RandR 1.2 enabled, ignore the following RandR disabled message.

Re:huh? but this is working for at least 3 years n

[Anonymous Coward]

Works out of the box on ATI hardware with Eyefinity support. I am running three 1080 HD monitors right now with OpenGL support under Ubuntu.
http://www.amd.com/us/products/technologies/amd-eyefinity-technology/Pages/eyefinity.aspx

This is more complex when the monitors need dual link. You need to read and see what each particular ATI board supports.

Re:nVidia artificially restrict their driver on Li

[sl149q]

I better unplug two of my four monitors really quickly! Must just be my imagination that I can see windows and drag things to them...

Re:nVidia artificially restrict their driver on Li

[Timmmm]

Presumably you have two cards? Or one of the cards that isn't restricted.

I have working 3-mon setup on AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

before that I had nVidia TwinView, but after adding extra card and third monitor and stitching it to other two through Xinerama, work on such machine soon became unbearable.

So after i learned about AMD's Eyefinity i was desperate enough to buy one right then, even before I knew if it would work as advertised.

So I bought HD6850 and spent many nights trying to connect third monitor through DP-DVI passive ( bassicall just two connectors and piece of wire)adapter.

I have learned that I need active adapter, since card needs one PLL per output and it has only twoof them. DP per se doesn't need PLL, because it works on fixed frequency ( it just churns packets of data, just like networking card, for example). So I needed something that would convert DP packets to picture frames fro DVI.

Since DP-DVI active adapter was quite expensive back then ( almost two years back IIRC), I've got meself DP-VGA. It was awkward, since it needlesly converted data to analog ( only to be converted back in monitor!) but it worked, save a few quirks.

Then I've got hold of cheap XFX's DP-DVI ( single link) adapter and used that instead.

And recently author of open source radeon driver told me that he made a tweak in kernel version 3.9 and later, which enabled the card to rationalize PLL use when theere was more than one output to be driven with same parameters ( pixel clock above all).

Since I have three equal monitors, I plopped back in elcheapo DP-DVI passive adapter, compiled new driver and tried it. It works !

Experience with Eyefinity as well as with open source radeon driver is GREAT for me:

http://www.avtomatika.com/MOJE_SLIKCE/3MON_EYEFINITY.jpg

Clunky, but use Xinerama

[crow]

I've been running a three-monitor desktop for many years, and I've had to use Xinerama to get it to work. This results in some serious performance issues occasionally (I think triggered by Adobe Flash, not surprisingly) where the whole system becomes mostly non-responsive for a while. The right way of doing it is to use xrandr to configure the displays into a single logical screen. That would work great if I had a video card that could drive all three monitors. Unfortunately, I have two separate video cards, so I have to use Xinerama to make it work, which, as noted, kills acceleration.

Support for RandR across multiple GPUs has been on the schedule for years, but it's slated for release 2.0, which isn't going to be out anytime soon. When it does come out, I'll be reconfiguring my system to use it.

A bit of Googling reveals many similar stories. For example: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/30958/setting-up-a-3-monitor-display

So if you can find a video card that can drive all your monitors, you should be all set. There may be some vendor-specific options for doing this, but I'm not aware of them. (I seem to recall some gaming cards that would let you combine multiple cards into a single logical card, and that might work here. I have no experience in that area.)

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

An Engineer? I'm already impressed.

What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have four monitors on my Linux box and I didn't have to do anything special. They just kinda worked. Maybe you're doing something wrong?

lmgtfy

[raymorris]

https://www.google.com/search?q=kernel%20changelog%20%22ray%20morris

NVIDIA

[kimvette]

Easy. Use NVIDIA's proprietary drivers and the NVIDIA control panel to configure you multi-monitor setup. You will get full 2D and 3D acceleration.

I'd Settle for Flash (Youtube) Working...

[littlewink]

I'm dumping Linux because Flash doesn't work. It's foolish to be without access to Youtube. And none of the Flash players work.

Re:I'd Settle for Flash (Youtube) Working...

[skade88]

Flash works just fine for me in Linux. In addition to that youtube will use html 5 video if flash is not installed. So either way youtube will work in Linux.

Re:nVidia artificially restrict their driver on Li

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the linked article is complete bullshit that you've sucked down.

Use a windowmanager from the 1990s

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched back to fvwm from kde. Xfce is not quite as configurable. Unfortunately fvwm has some crippling bugs that crash it occasionally.

Windoze + Cygwin?

[D,Petkow]

>I am getting so desperate that I am starting to think of running Windows on my box, but that would be painful in so many other ways given my work environment >revolves around the Linux toolset." You could go full retard and install Windows + proprietary drivers and then either 1. setup a virtual Linux box or 2.use CygWin ( http://www.cygwin.com/ )

it was easy for me

[skade88]

I am running Ubuntu 13.04 with an amd vid card. I just plugged in my monitors, then when I turned on my compy they just worked without me having to do anything.

The topic for trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me answer all the troll posts in a few lines.

Remember that eyefinity demo from 2009? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Vf8R_gOec Can you guess what operating system it was demoed on?

Linux is not the problem. Multiscreen has been working for a long time either with randr or with proprietary implementations. If your nvidia card with the proprietary driver can not use 3 screens, maybe you should complain to nvidia about their driver because it's their job to make it work.

Nowadays you can use a single desktop on multiple gpus too. The trolls can say that this is "simple" all they want but the simple fact is that this required some sophisticated infrastructure like the new randr specification, dma-buf/prime, etc. Of course this works best on the open source drivers. I don't know the state for the nvidia drivers but they wanted to support it too. If this doesn't work for your nvidia card, maybe you should complain to nvidia about their driver.

Free software?

[alfino]

The real question is: which solution works with the X.org drivers and does not require me to pull in proprietary binary code? My experience is that binary-only graphics cards drivers will blow up sooner or later, or might just stop being ported to newer X.org versions.

Hardware Accelerated is difficult enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel is the only GPU manufacturer that has a fully free graphics stack. AMD has a free driver, Nvidia has free nothing. (There is a free reverse-engineered 3rd party stack for Nvidia cards, nouveau)

On the other hand, Intel's wifi will not work with free software.

It's a real shitty situation.

Avoid nVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

nVidia on Linux just isn't very good. Lots of driver issues whether you go with the nVidia binary or the open source. If you have a laptop that you need to dock and undock it gets worse.

eyefinity vs kepler surround

[rockowitz]

I, like the OP, am looking to move to a 3 (maybe 4) monitor setup on my Linux system. Like him, this is primarly a system for software development. And like him, I was unaware until this thread of the multi-monitor support in Kepler. So I've already learned something important. I've been looking at Radeon 7870 cards, and it would appear that the comparable nVidia would be a 660.

Are the multi-monitor support with Eyefinity 2.0 (as on the 7870) indeed comparable, or are the reasons why I would choose one or the other? One advantage to nVidia is that Radeon cards (with the exception of the few Sapphire Flex models) require an active DisplayPort to DVI adapter if one wants to connect 3 non-DisplayPort devices, but nVidia does not have this limitation. On the other hand, and this is fuzzier, Eyefinity has been around longer and is presumably more mature. On nVidia, I believe a single X screen (as implemented in the card/driver) is limited to 3 monitors; the 4th must be a separate X screen. It's not clear to me if Eyefinity has a similar restriction.

Of possible importanance is that the monitors will be heterogeneous. Currently the system has two 24" 1920x1080 monitors. I expect to add a 27" 2560x1440,

Re:huh? but this is working for at least 3 years n

[Trogre]

Now all we need is support for hot-pluggable displays, like USB VGA cards that use the sisusbvga driver but the X server knows nothing about until it restarts.