[LUNI] Ubuntu and ATI FirePro 2260 (PCI) cards

[Martin Maney]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 09:30:23PM -0500, Richard Lynch wrote:
> Dual head on Linux is a PITA...

I could agree if this were, oh, five or six years ago I guess it was
that I first casually messed around with it a little.

> Last I checked, you could only get it to work if the monitors were set
> with pixel sizes and alignment to form a rectangle, not an L.
> 
> I.e., this is kosher:
> 
> +--------------++---------------+
> |              ||               |
> |              ||               |
> |              ||               |
> |              ||               |
> +--------------++---------------+
> 
> This is NOT:
> +--------------++---------------+
> |              ||               |
> |              ||               |
> |              ||               |
> +--------------+|               |
>                 |               |
>                 +---------------+
> 
> Windows and Mac just make it work.  Linux, not so much...

I was playing around with that about a year ago, and it pretty much
Just Worked for the dissimilar-size displays side by side (except I may
never have tried it with the smaller one on the left side?).  What I
really liked was the simple (one xrandr command) setup to "float" the
smaller display box (a projector) inside the larger (desktop LCD).  It
automagically would slide around if the mouse cursor moved beyond the
projector's window (unless you wanted to nail it down, that was a
different single xrandr command).  I really *wanted* to do that with
Windows XP, but that I couldn't figure out how to do that without
spending money (no budget) for software (no admin access to install it
anyway) from some third party.

Anyway, unless the left side/right side actually matters, which seems
more than a bit unlikely, your experience of Linux's dual-head support
differs hugely from mine.  Oh, the simple side-by-side could be managed
with the GUI tool - I only had to resort to CLI commands for the
overlapping, differently-sized displays.

> You can always try the proprietary drivers...

Could be drivers vs. hardware, yeah.  That would have been an older ATI
card I was messing with, I think - 7500?

> I believe you are in the land of bleeding edge of the envelope for
> Xorg configuration...

I didn't catch it the first time around, but I seem to recall that the
DisplayPort support was a relatively late addition to the open source
ATI drivers.  Since I don't actually have anything to use that jack
with, it may be that it's still not fully supported - not something I
make great efforts to follow.

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