On Fri, 2003-12-19 at 00:56, Oliver Jones wrote:
In particular I'm interested to know if dual display and TV out works with ATI video cards under Linux. I'm pretty sure this works with nVidia boards under Linux. Anyone here doing things like that on an ATI?
I have a Radeon 9000 configured as a dual-head card. The biggest pain with it is you need XFree86 4.3, and there's no official Debian packages for that yet (even unstable). This also means you need a 2.6 kernel, or the patch for 2.4 with the 4.3 DRI driver. Though I discovered, on the 9000 at least, that DRI doesn't work if the card is configured for dual-head display, and there's only plans to support accelerated 3D on the primary display anyway. On the positive side, the ATI driver supports the xinerama extension, and gnome-2.4 is fully xinerama-aware and does a great job of sorting windows onto one display or the other, unlike under nVidia's 'twinview' system where windows would often end up split between the two displays. With the tradeoff being twinview gives you accelerated 3D on both displays, I'm looking at getting a nice dual-DVI GeForce 5700 sometime after xmas when I have money again. -- Colin Palmer <colinp(a)waikato.ac.nz> University of Waikato, ITS Division