Four monitor setup with two Nvidia graphics cards
I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 and I have two nVidia quadro 2000 video cards, each with two monitors plugged in (all 4 monitors are identical).
Now I have the latest nVidia drivers, and I'm trying to use the nVidia control panel to use all four monitors, and I can't get it to work.
Currently, my configuration is using TwinView to have 2 monitors per X screen. This doesn't work well because either
i turn xinerama on, and nothing appears on the screen when I start a X session with Compiz enabled. Things only work in Ubuntu 2D.
i turn xinerama off, and compiz works, but now, I cant drag windows between the two screens and i have no idea how to start applications in the other screen.
Is there a better way to configure my four monitor setup? Is there a way to get both GPUs onto a single X screen?
Solution 1:
Your post is a bit old, but the answer might be useful to others. Since your post, there are even newer NVidia drivers which /kind of/ work for me. Xinerama works, but it's still buggy and I occasionally need to restart X ("service lightdm restart", or "service gdm restart" - depends on distro).
With Xinerama off, you have separate X screens. The mouse can move between them, but that's all. This is normal, and I can't tolerate it myself.
To start an application on the second screen (first screen is ":0.0", second screen is ":0.1"):
$ export DISPLAY=:0.1
$ xterm # or your application.