[ale] A question for the X gurus out there.

Michael B. Trausch fd0man at gmail.com
Tue Mar 6 00:12:21 EST 2007


On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 21:50 -0500, Randal Jarrett wrote:

> 
> I'm running SuSe SLED10.  
> 
> I have 2 video cards, NVidia GeForce 7900 GS PCI-e cards,
> not in SLI mode.  Each to a separate lcd.
> 
> Most everything appears to work ok but I cannot drag
> an object from one display to another. 
> 
> Is it possible??  What am I missng??


I am pretty sure that you can use Xinerama across two (or more) video
boards.  Xinerama is an extension which allows the dragging between two
different screens, though on all of the implementations that I know of
(including X.org's), OpenGL only works on one of the displays.  All
other displays will display a black area where OpenGL applications are
supposed to be.

The multi-screen mode (the non-Xinerama mode) where you have two
different desktops is actually quite beneficial to use.  It is different
from the way the Windows world works, sure, but with the right software
(I use GNOME, Evolution, and Epiphany which all play nice in this
configuration) you can be quite productive with two different displays,
and run OpenGL applications on both of them.  Very nice.  Sure, you lose
the "extended" desktop, but I think that is a small price to pay.  Your
primary display will be :0.0 and your secondary one will be :0.1, and so
forth, in this configuration.  (Xinerama just makes a really big desktop
on :0.0, and Ximerama-aware window managers will display panels on each,
if you configure them to do so.)


> Under that other OS (M$) I can drag across as long as the
> windows are not full screen. (sorry about bringing that up).
> 
> Any suggestions??


I would work with the non-Xinerama mode for a little while and see what
you think of it.  It feels a bit awkward at first if you have gotten
used to using more than one monitor on a Windows system.  However, there
are definitely advantages.

(Just as a side note; I know that when I was using Windows XP on a
ThinkPad it also had problems with 3D-accelerated applications on both
displays, stretching the desktop to accomodate.  I don't know if there
is some major programming problem with that type of situation or not,
but it seemed that at least with the drivers that I had on my old
ThinkPad, even Microsoft's operating system didn't get it right.)

    -- Mike

--
Michael B. Trausch
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