Alright you Suse guys, I could use some help..

I'm running Suse 10 and I have two nvidia cards : a dual head gf4 ti4200 and an old cheapo single head with a vanta gpu. Originally, I configured the system to be able to do dual monitors using one connected to the ti4200 and the other one to the vanta. This took some work but through getting old drivers that support legacy gpus and editing some files (according to suse and nvidia docs), I was able to get it to work.

But now, i'm wanting to forget about that old card and just use the dual head on the ti4200. This is what I'm having trouble with. No matter what i do, I can't get that thing to recognize the second head. According to the suse docs, sax2 is supposed to recognize it automatically and provide a box labelled “Activate Dual Head Mode” with a configure button beside it. I don't have this anywhere. I've tried to get it to work with the opensource nv drivers. I've ran YOU to get the latest Nvidia Drivers and tried them. I've downloaded the package from nvidia themselves and ran it in run level 3 manually. I've manually editing my xorg.conf file to try and get another device on there. But alas, nothing.

I've read a few posts on linux forums/newsgroups about people who had this working perfectly in suse 9.3, but as soon as they got 10 up and running, they hit problems left and right using sax2 (but were able to fix it by just copying the device selection in xorg.conf and setting it to the second screen.. unfortunately, this isn't working for me) I've also read things about Suse/Novell knowing of this issue and are trying to fix it. Whether this has any merit to it or not, I have no idea.

Sorry for the non-houdini-related post, but I figured you Suse people might be able to spread some love and help me out with this. Maybe even just post your xorg.conf file so I can see what you've got going on. Can anyone on 10 see the ‘Activate Dual Head Mode’ box?

thanks everyone,
dave

I found sax2 to be useless, but perhaps I was using it wrong. I edited the xorg.conf by hand and everything works swimmingly. This is SuSE 9.3 btw and on a laptop, so caveat emptor )

John C will be able to comment better on sax2 than me though, I'm somewhat used to editing the xorg.conf files so when sax2 didn't give me what I wanted, I almost immediately gave up.

Cheers,

Peter B

Unfortunately, I'm not running a dual here, sorry, so I'm not much help. I do know SaX2 changed in SUSE 10 and they seemed to remove a lot of options and replace them with a user friendly(*cough*) list of params to tweak, under Graphics Card/Options. I do see a “TwinView” in there, along with “Second MonitorRefresh” stuff, but not the button you mention, specifically. Worth mentioning I'm running a 64 bit system with a PCIe NVidia Card.

Sorry I can't be more help!

Cheers,

J.C.

Actually… I just figured out what i was doing wrong. I kept attempting to configure multiple x screens based on one chip (card).. While this can be done supposidly, it's not recommended according to the nvidia readme. For some reason I could never get it to work and trying to get it to work caused big time problems for whatever reason.

So basically in the end, i just edited it by hand to use twin view instead of two x sessions and everything works lovely now. Man, that seriously was like 4 hours of screwing around late last night, until i took 5 min to read the readme closer and another 5 to add a couple lines involving twin view.. Teach me for paying attention to the net before paying attention to official documentation. :wink:

Anyways, now off to get this tv-out to work which is the whole reason i bought that crappy vanta 2 years ago. See in windows, i could only get it to either use the dual head or one head and the tv out. So i bought the vanta to have my dual monitors and tv output for cheap color correction at home. But now that i'm running suse, supposidly the nvidia linux drivers can handle all three outputs from the one card (twinview + vivo).. That would be sweet if i could get that to work.

Thanks guys for the replies.