[NCLUG] surgery

[Sean Roberts]

On Wednesday February 27 2002 4:58pm, you wrote:
> William Dan Terry wrote:
> > At the suggestion (about a year ago) of someone from HP (have
> > forgotten who now) I finally picked up a Matrox card (G400 32MB
> > Dual-Head 4X AGP) to use in my HP Visualize X550 - the reason being
>
> Not knowing what the HP card is, I imagine that it is using the SVGA
> driver in XFree86, and it will happily detect and use the card without
> any changes.
>
> Hopefully.
>
> On the other hand, I think that there are specific Matrox drivers that
> you can use to enhance the performance of that card.  Add to the
> equation that you might be using Xinerama on this dual-head card, and
> you are probably talking about XFree86 v4 -- and I have noooo idea what
> that will do.

I have a matrox G450 Video card with 2 monitors.  You want to use the mga 
driver which you can get from the matrox web site in source or in precompiled 
object format for linux.  You may have to search around their web site some 
they have it stuck off in the corner somewhere.

To use both monitors you will need 2 monitor, 2 device, and 2 screen sections 
in your XF86config file as well as some special mojo in the serverlayout 
section.  E-mail me if you need more help on that front.  I don't use 
Xinerama, instead KDE2 will pick up both monitors and give you 2 separate 
desktops, wereas with Xinerama you get 1 big one, I guess it is personal 
taste as to which you choose.  For the former case monitor one is display 0.0 
and monitor 2 is 0.1.  This means you cannot move a window from one monitor 
to the other (your mouse pointer can certainly switch).  On the other hand 
with Xinerama you get windows straddling the monitors and when you maximize a 
window it covers both monitors.

Enabling glx, and dri was a little more difficult, although that was more in 
finding good docs for glx or dri than anything having to do with the Vid 
card.  You can't get dri on both monitors though.

I gotta go to work but email me if you need more help setting it up, I've 
already done it twice so it would just take me poking around a little to 
remember all I did.

Good luck.

Sean Roberts