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My apologies if the title of this entry doesn’t show up in your browser. It’s Japanese (I think) for “3 monitors.” I chose a Japanese translation because it was infuriating Japanese technology that was causing me to pull my hair out… if I had hair to pull. The picture shown here is my desk at work, with three CRTs.
Last Friday, I took it upon myself to scrounge around the office for another PCI video card and monitor to expand my desk to three monitors. And the Lord spake, saying, “three shalt be the number of monitors thou shalt have, no more, no less, and the number of monitors shalt be three. Four monitors thou shalt not have, nor either two monitors, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out…”
Alright, enough of that. I had two flat panel LCD screens at my previous employer for a couple of years. And I’ve had two monitors on my desk for more than two years at my current employer. After nearly five years of using two monitors, I’ve discovered one thing: a desktop of 2048×768 between two monitors is simply more productive… and cool. Three monitors can only be more productive… and cooler. My momma didn’t raise no dummy.
With the roll-out of our new phone system and the addition of our new Call Manager, I realized I needed to keep an eye on my status in the phone system. However, the Call Manager window always ends up behind another window. So, a third monitor made sense to keep smaller windows open and visible.
Finding a spare PCI card and monitor was easy. The basement at our building is a gold mine of derelict computer cases ripe with late 90s peripherals just collecting dust. I found a 1997 Matrox Millennium II PCI card with 16 MB. Perfect. I slapped the card into my Debian machine, connected an unused 15″ monitor and powered up.
A quick check of “Xorg -scanpci” showed the new card’s bus ID at PCI:0:14:0. I added the new device, monitor, and screen stanzas to my xorg.conf file, modified the serverlayout, and restarted X. Three monitors changed modes, and when KDE was finished loading, I had a desktop that was 3072×768. But, the left monitor wasn’t painting. The X server saw three screens, and expanded the desktop (thanks to Xinerama), but the left monitor was full of crap.
I checked my config file, and all looked okay. I disabled the new screen in serverlayout, restarted X, and the left and center monitors worked great. I enabled the right screen and disabled the left screen, restarted X, and the center and right monitors worked great. But all three at one time just wouldn’t work.
I left work Friday scratching my head. I went into the office for a couple of hours on Saturday to try again. I swapped video cards, tried a different monitor, lowered the color depth, changed resolution, and slammed the keyboard a few times. Nothing worked. Japanese shit.
By Monday morning, I was pretty pissed that I couldn’t get this setup working. I hate when this kind of shit kicks my ass. I spent my “down” time between calls from the queue Googling for some help. I tried several other things, like changing drivers, numbering the screens, and cursing like a sailor, but during lunch, I found a forum on some site (which I have since forgot) where someone had the exact three video cards I was trying to get working. The post wasn’t of much help, but a portion of his xorg.conf file was. He had an Option “OldDmaInit” “true” line in his device stanza that I didn’t have. After adding that line to my two Matrox card stanzas, X fired up, and KDE showed me a glorious 3-monitor desktop of 3072×768… and all three screens were working great! Here’s a crappy picture from my cell phone of all three monitors. If you’re interested, here’s a link to my xorg.conf file.
On a related topic, my AMD64 Debian Linux server here at home seemed to have bought the farm. I was watching the Seahawks game when Tina came in and said the monitor was clicking on and off (what’s that clickin’ noise?). I checked it out, and couldn’t even reboot the machine — I had power, but no POST, no video. My first guess was a power supply. I picked up a new 500 watt power supply at work and put in in the server. Bingo. The server powered up and booted just fine. That’s a relief. Fifty bucks is better than a new motherboard and/or hard drives.
Thats a sweet setup Jim, I know that when I tried to do duallies in Kubuntu Xorg screamed bloody murder and booted right to tty1 – kinda funny for a while, then just annoying.
I still want you to come by again, next time you can get off of hell’s island.
SWEET!!
Yeah, it’s pretty sweet… I just wish the company would spring for some nice LCD flat panels. A 19″ in the middle, a 17″ on the left, and a 15″ on the right kinda messes up the desktop alignment… but it’s not too bad. Here’s a screenshot of my desktop (126KB, 3072×768).
Frankly, I tend to enjoy seeing *something* kick your ass in the tech way:) Even you, one of the “Gods of the Internet” do fail to get things working exactly when you desire them…It can be quite amusing…seeing a geek suffer from T.E.D (Tech Equipment Disfunction).
Yeah, but things don’t kick my ass often, unless it’s some bullshit Micro$oft fucked-upness… like FrontPage or ASP.NET. It’s not that I couldn’t learn Micro$oft shit, I just don’t wanna. I have an aversion to everything Micro$oft.