[ale] Dual video on HP pavillion running Centos

[Neal Rhodes]

So, we've been running Centos 6.3 on an HP Pavilion p7-1131 Desktop PC
for about 1.5 years now.   And loving it. 

We now lust after running two 24" monitors for work.  No games, just two
decent monitors at 1920x1080. 

The unit was delivered with an additional card: an HP 634478-001, which
is an HP flavor of AMD Radeon, which has DVI and HDMI only. (no VGA;
weird.)  If this card is present, then I've experienced that  it takes
precedence, the onboard VGA goes dormant, and there ain't no BIOS setup
options which pertain to making both of them play nice with each other. 

And the really interesting thing is that the system board has a DVI
connector, which is mounted onto a header and goes through a port in the
back.   And on the DVI port on the back is a black plastic cover screwed
on which says "DO NOT REMOVE".    (reminds me of a 78 Alfa-Romeo sedan
which had a sticker on the rear seats: "rear seats not to be occupied
when vehicle is in motion".)  



Based on HP's website, the specs on the unit say: 

Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD Integrated graphics (DX10.1)
*Integrated video is not available if a graphics card is installed. 
        Supports PCI Express x16 graphics cards
        DVI and VGA ports (both ports can be used at the same time)
        
        
Curious-er and Curious-er.   This thing was shipped with Win7.  
 
Various HP articles indicate they stick those plastic covers on when the
additional video card would have caused the onboard video ports to be
disabled.   I don't see any way this thing would have driven the VGA as
delivered. 

My inclinations are to try using the onboard DVI port, since I took the
Radeon card out.  I'm trying to figure out how to figure out if the
Intel video chip would fail to drive the two ports at full resolution if
it could do one. 

Any reason to not try?  Is my dipstick gonna fall off?  

I'd have to get a DVI-to-VGA cable to hook up the 2nd monitor.  Can I
just hook it up and run the Display Preferences utility and tell it to
Detect Monitors?  Or do I have to reboot?  Reason being that I'm
switching these two monitors back and forth with client notebooks. 

Neal Rhodes
MNOP Ltd