[Novalug] Dual Monitor setup not working - No clue, what did I do?

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 16:10 -0500, Nick Danger wrote:

> Dell workstation, built in Intel graphics card, plus an add on ATI PCI 
> card. Both connected to Nokia monitors. I just installed Fedora 12 from 
> the Live CD.

> And here is where it gets weird. I dont have one desktop spanning two 
> displays. I dont even have one desktop mirrored. What I have is two 
> different desktops. I can move the mouse from one to the other as you'd 
> expect, but I have two sets of upper and lower menu bars, I cannot drag 
> from screen to screen, and what I launch in screen 0 stays there. Since 
> Im trying to get firefox running in both displays, that causes an issue 
> as I cant run firefox again in the second since it says "another process 
> already running".  Amusingly, running xrandr shows only a single 
> display. Which one it shows depends on which monitor you are running the 
> xterm under. On one side it says "VGA-0" and the other shows "VGA-1".

You are on Fedora 12 which uses the xrandr version 1.3 extension to do
more than one display with the X-window system.

Unfortunately:

"Xinerama supports the combining of any X displays across multiple
ASICs, however RANDR only supports a single GPU."
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinerama )

Which leads me to believe that xrandr won't span one desktop across two
different video chipsets.  By configuring xorg.conf by hand you were
able to tell X about your two cards and what to do with them, so it did
the best it could: fired up the circuitry and ran the default window
manager against both of them independently and inferred some idea of how
one screen should be related to the other so your single mouse can
travel from one to another.

I am not an authority on this -- I've just been fighting with Fedora 12
(including xrandr 1.3) for the last two days.  I'm trying to get S-video
output working and it's being bitchy.[1]

The question may remain: can you still use the deprecated xinerama setup
to do what you want as it appears that was the solution in the past.

[1] computer term for when what you google as the solution doesn't work
on your own computer: xrandr --output S-video --set tv_standard ntsc
(FAIL)

-- 
Maxwell Spangler