Gordaen’s Blog

I recently bought two new 19″ monitors (with a nice 1680×1050 resolution each). I was surprised that I simply plugged them both in and started the computer and Gnome was correctly displaying a cloned image (i.e., the same thing on both screens) at the correct resolution on both monitors. Unfortunately, getting them to work as one (a virtual 3360×1050 resolution) was quite a bit trickier.

I tried the easy method of “BigDesktop” and came up with a core dump. Google revealed nothing so I moved onto the “MergedFB” method. Long story short, I had no success after 2-3 hours. Essentially, it took that amount of time before I stopped trusting online sources and started looking at the logs. MergedFB is no longer supported… I moved on to “XRandR.” And had immediate success… sort of.

Within five minutes, I had dual screens working as I wanted, like one large, virtual desktop. making it easy to move windows back and forth across the two screens. Just one problem: It was slow! It was painfully slow! 486 slow! If I switched workspaces, it could take 15-30 seconds to repaint the desktop. When I really got going, the computer would not keep up with my typing and when the letters eventually came out, they were scrambled.

Fortunately, this is another case of the right solution being fairly simple. In the xorg.conf file, I had to change “AccelMethod” from “EXA” to “XAA” (learned from this link). I restarted X and everything is fast again. Ah, wonderful high resolution… *drools*