Dual monitor on Dell Inspiron 8600c

andy — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 13:54:00 +0000

Vacation, at last! First on my TODO list is to get the second monitor output working on my Dell 8600c. When following the NVIDIA README instructions I get some really weird output. It seems the NVIDIA driver does not detect the presence of the second monitor (tried with both Iiyama 17” and a 32” JVC LCD HDTV). Instead, it maps both screen on the internal flatpanel display, which produces a really funny effect of having both screen framebuffers mapped to 0,0 of the DFP screen!

The magic configuration parameter is ConnectedMonitor. The NVIDIA driver detected “DFP-0, CRT-0” by default when dual screen is configured. The trick is to specify a ConnectedMonitor option in both Screen sections, each specifying either “DFP-0” or “CRT-0”. The relevant parts of the xorg.confg are shown below:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen1"
    Device         "NVIDIA Corporation NV34M [GeForce FX Go 5200]-1"
    Monitor        "Monitor1"
    ...
    Option         "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0"
    ...
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "NVIDIA Corporation NV34M [GeForce FX Go 5200]-0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    ...
    Option         "ConnectedMonitor" "CRT-0"
    ...
EndSection

Also note the separate monitor definition references. I had to force the CRT-0 specs to VertRefresh 60HZ as my JVC LCD HDTV only accepts VGA signals which have a vertical refresh of 60HZ, anything above or below will produce a nice blue screen.

Download the full xorg.conf with dual screen setup

LolocoJr » monitor

Dual monitor on Dell Inspiron 8600c