Dual head AGP video card recommendations

[Peter Eddy]

Peter Boy wrote:

> Does the Matrox run in DVI configuration with the open source XFree
> driver or do I need the binary Matrox (still-in-beta-for-several-years)
> driver?

I don't have an answer to the DVI question, but I do have a comment 
about Matrox dual-head cards in general. I have two machines that are 
both dual head. One uses a dual head Matrox G450 card and the other uses 
an nVidia GeForce2 MX 100 and an Intel i810.

The Matrox requires those perpetually in beta drivers to run in xinerama 
mode (or at least run will, as far as I can tell) while the other 
configuration with the two different cards doesn't require any special 
drivers.

As I think others have commented, with any dual-head XFree configuration 
I know of you're probably going to have to give up direct rendering and 
have to live with being able to view motion-video (like DVDs) on only 
one "head." Of course, for some people the extra screen real estate is 
worth the trade off.

One more thing worth mentioning, if you use KDE then you may not be 
happy with its font rendering on a dual-head machine. Gnome is ok, but 
with KDE you really need to turn off the font server (xfs) and specify 
font paths in XF86Config directly, even then though KTerm fonts are awful.

Peter