I’ve finally managed to get my triple screens working in Debian Sid with a PCI Voodoo Banshee (Got ancient ?) and a Geforce 7300GS, this is on an Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, custom 2.6.32 kernel and nVidia drivers ver. 256.53.
Trickiest part was to get them recognised in the right order.
For the Quick Rundown – assuming you’re starting from scratch :
- Set default video card to PCI in the BIOS.
- Install Debian.*
- Install nVidia Drivers.
- Setup X with Screen 0 as nVidia Geforce 7300gs and Screen1 as Voodoo Banshee.
- Start X.
- You should end up with two screens, each with a seperate X server running (you cannot drag programs between the two).
- Run “sudo nvidia-settings” in a terminal.**
- The nVidia settings manager should show you 2 screens under “X Server Display Configuration”, one which is disabled.
- Click on the disabled screen, click configure, then click Seperate X Screen.
- Tick “Enable Xinerama”.
- Click “Save to X Configuration File”.
- Reboot the computer / Restart X.
- You should now have both screens on the nVidia card going but the third one on the Banshee (or whatever you’re using in its place).
- You will need to manually edit the xorg.conf file now *** –
- Add this line ‘Screen 2 “Screen2” LeftOf “Screen0″‘ in the Section “ServerLayout”.
- Add an extra “Monitor” Section with the Identifier as “Monitor2”, VendorName and ModelName I have as “Unknown” but you can customise it.
- In the device section, you should still have the section for your second video card, change the Identifier for that card to “Device2”
- There will already be 2 Screen sections after the Device sections, copy one of those but replace the Identifier, Device, and Monitor lines with “Screen2″,”Device2″,”Monitor2” respectively.
- Restart the X server and hope for the best !
I got this working just this afternoon and now I am happily typing away on my 3 monitors.
* Debian can be replaced by any other distribution but I’ve tested this on Debian.
** If sudo is not installed, then login to X as root.
*** This will need to be done as root.
