Dual Monitor on Optiplex 745

[MikeMike]

I have Dell Optiplex 745 dual boot system and I am having a hard time getting dual monitors(Dell 1905FP) set up. The motherboard came with a built in vga and the purchasing department here at my work decided to get the extra DVI PCI-e card for dual monitor support. (This is a barebores card that does not have a GPU or anything fancy).

After the Windows support guys added a driver, the machine will now display to both monitors in WinXP, but when it comes to Fedora setup, I am on my own.

I have tried using System > Administration > Display, but when ever I make a change, it either does nothing or it will not restart X.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Mike

[MikeMike]

Well since my last post, I have contacted the folks at Dell customer support and found a reasonable solution for this problem. They did not have an Optiplex 745 with this same graphics card so I had a bit of emailing back and forth with their Linux Support Specialist-Ian Wilson.
Basically we set up a new xorg.conf manually, and through trial and error, we were able to make it work.

One weird thing to mention is that when we first got xorg.conf working on both screens, my desktop had a blank section on the right screen (it took up about 40% of the right screen). This blank section would allow the mouse over event and it would allow me to drag an app over it, but the desktop image was chopped regardless of what image I installed. We found a work around by adding the following line to Section “Device”:

Option “NoDRI”

This fixed the desktop, but DRI is a framework for allowing direct access to graphics hardware. So disabling it caused my window title bars to disappear (not good). A work around for that was to add a startup program in System > Preferences > Personal >Sessions for Metacity (the start up command is metacity &).

It appears that I can not enable any desktop effects or use compiz, but I think I will probably get a real graphics card if I decide that I need eye candy.

This is my first experience with Dell Customer Support. I was surprised to find a dedicated Linux guy there. Dell rocks!!! Ian Rocks!!!

Below is a copy of the new working xorg.conf.

# Xorg configuration created by Mike and Dell Linux Support



Section "ServerLayout"

Identifier "single head configuration"

Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0

InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"

EndSection



Section "InputDevice"

Identifier "Keyboard0"

Driver "kbd"

Option "XkbModel" "pc105"

Option "XkbLayout" "us+inet"

EndSection



Section "Monitor"



Option "DPMS"

Option "Position" "0 0"

Identifier "VGAmon"

EndSection



Section "Monitor"



Option "DPMS"

Identifier "TMDSmon"

Option "RightOf" "VGAmon"

EndSection



Section "Device"

Identifier "Videocard0"

Driver "intel"

Option "NoDRI"

Option "monitor-VGA" "VGAmon"

Option "monitor-TMDS-1" "TMDSmon"

EndSection



Section "Screen"

Identifier "Screen0"

Device "Videocard0"

Monitor "VGAmon"

DefaultDepth 24

SubSection "Display"



Viewport 0 0

Modes "1280x1024"

Virtual 2560 1024

Depth 24

EndSubSection

EndSection