[plug] Multiple Xwindows Sessions on Multiple Monitors

[Cameron Patrick]

On Mon, 14 Oct 2002 15:14:39 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

| Option 2: http://www.google.com/search?q=xinerama   :
| I haven't set it up personally but I gather it isn't difficult. I have 
| an NVidia card, so it has its own Xinerama implementation for tv-out etc 
| which works pretty well (if only Debian would compile all their X apps 
| with Xinerama support ... grr).

It isn't too difficult.  Basically, you set everything up as per your
option #1, and then change /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers to say something
like:

:0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X -dpi 96 +xinerama

If you're using two Nvidia cards (like I am), you may have to use the
XFree86 "nv" driver (rather than the "nvidia" binary driver) - the nvidia
driver was incredibly unstable in a two-monitor setup. Also, the only
window managers that seem to like Xinerama are KDE3 and Sawfish. (*sniff*
WindowMaker certainly doesn't.)  KDE, in particular, seems to handle
multiple monitor systems much better than Windows does. The disadvantage of
using KDE's window manager, though, is that you have to use the rest of KDE
too. :-(

-CP.