Fedora 9, multi-monitor, multi-card woes
Jeff Hardy
hardyjm at potsdam.edu
Thu Jul 3 20:16:24 UTC 2008
Jeff Hardy wrote:
> Phil Meyer wrote:
>> Jeffrey M. Hardy wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> From FC1 to F8 inclusive, I have used the same hardware to have a
>>> fully-spanned desktop using three cards across four monitors. Rather
>>> than being too ambitious at the moment, I am merely trying to get
>>> three separate non-cloned desktops across three different cards.
>>> Here is lspci output:
>>>
>>> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV17GL [Quadro
>>> NVS] (rev a3)
>>> 05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2
>>> MX/MX 400] (rev b2)
>>> 05:01.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2
>>> MX/MX 400] (rev b2)
>>
>> We see that a lot here. What is happening is that no single driver
>> will handle both of those cards. Your choices are:
>>
>> 1. (recommended) dump the $20.00 MX 400 for something made this
>> century. :)
>>
>> 2. run both the legacy and the new nvidia drivers. This is a REAL
>> PITA and takes a level of expertise nearing black magic to make work.
>> If you are not a wizard class admin, don't attempt it. :)
>>
>> When my users bring be machines with mismatched junk video cards to
>> install, I tell them strait up that for the time it would take to make
>> it work, I could make enough money to buy a new top of the line Nvidia
>> or ATI card.
>>
>>
>> Think about it.
>>
>> Good Luck!
>>
>
> The thing is, the same driver always did. I've been running the
> kmod-nvidia-96xx series of drivers from livna for years, which supports
> both kinds of card. Unfortunately it hasn't been updated upstream to
> work with the newer kernel in F9. In its stead, the nv driver should do
> the trick for both types of card. And why would mixing drivers matter?
> Just a different Driver line in the config for each card.
>
Not willing to wait to see if the 96xx driver is ever updated, I picked
up some cards that work with the 173 driver. As long as I use the
nvidia driver, all is well. I have nvidia's twinview up for my AGP
dual-head card, and the other PCI cards work fine, for a total of four
screens. I have yet to get xinerama working across all of the screens,
but that is not a huge priority.
Interestingly, I found that I have the same issue as I had with the
older cards if I attempt to use the nv driver. It seems nv simply
cannot deal with any of the PCI cards I have tried.
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