Comments on: Modeline Generation and Xinerama Info

By: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:04:46 +0000

Hey Marlon! Glad to hear it helped!! =:)

By: Marlon Nelson

Marlon Nelson — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 17:44:37 +0000

I just upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 and found out a crucial modeline disappeared in the process from my xorg.conf.

Thanks to this post, I was able to generate it with gtf and add it back manually.

Thanks!

By: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:25:44 +0000

@Anne Wilson: YAY!! =:) Glad to hear it helped. I was pretty stoked to hear about this little tool too!!

By: Anne Wilson

Anne Wilson — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:36:51 +0000

I was introduced to gtf some years ago, yes in the ‘bad old days’, and thought it wonderful. Sadly memory failure has caused me to give hours to trying to remember its name. Your blog has given one of my monitors a new lease of life

By: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:11:20 +0000

@Tony: Yeah, me too. Sorry to be confusing. I get a whole lot of info, but then the Xinerama info at the end. The stuff in front of it is the standard xdpyinfo output that you get without adding a -ext. =:)

@Tom Mann: Yeah you’re right. Either that or just manually change

Option “Xinerama” “0″

Option “Xinerama” “1″

manually. =:)

By: Tom Mann

Tom Mann — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:29:24 +0000

When I run 2x 1680×1050 Monitors side by side I used to do the following (I think this may be what you are after, though my memory of it is a bit flaky, sorry!)

sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings
sudo nvidia-settings

enable xinerama in nvidia-settings, then switch to twinview (from what I remember xinerama was a checkbox in earlier versions)

That would give me 2x 1680×1050 side by side, without opening a new session per screen, and without the toolbar spanning both screens.

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 06:22:02 +0000

I’m using the nvidia driver on my Ubuntu desktop too but I get a flood of output when I run `xdpyinfo -ext XINERAMA`, not just the few lines you get.

By: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 02:35:19 +0000

Hey AC! Hm. Unfortunately, I don’t have a choice about the nvidia card being that this is a laptop and I can’t swap it out. =:(

By: AC

AC — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:12:03 +0000

Part of your problems come from using an nvidia card, which provides the non-standard twinview rather than xrandr 1.2 ( http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2 ).

Since xrandr 1.2, I haven’t had to fiddle around with xorg.conf anymore, and switching from single head to dual head to clone mode is as simple as entering a single xrandr command. And the great thing about xrandr is that the two monitors don’t have to have the same size. My laptop has a resolution of 1440×900, and I regularly combine it into an extended desktop with an external monitor of resolution 1400×1050.

xrandr also allows you to add modelines in case they should be missing; but if you are running your external monitor at its native resolution, that shouldn’t be necessary.