Inspirated

“Two heads are better than one.”

Not everything is going perfect (I’ll get to that later), but it is an awesome feeling to be able to manage different windows on a 2048-pixels wide workspace.

(Click on the thumbnails for larger versions.)

The laptop is providing the VGA output using the Intel driver that’s included in X.org. However, to get the thing working, I had to edit my xorg.conf by hand. Here’s a list of things that work:

• The workspace “stretches” across the two displays by using xrandr commands outlined on this page.
• Applications get sliced across the display using Xinerama and as seen in the first two screenshots, even MPlayer’s x11 video output is perfectly happy with it.

And a list of things that don’t:

• For some unknown reason (which I’m too chuffed right now to be bothered about), if I specify the display modes explicitly for my laptop LCD screen on line 49 of the xorg.conf linked above, my VGA stops getting a display. Nevertheless, even without specifying display modes, the LCD resolution gets set as expected (1280×800 and 1024×768 for single and dual heads respectively).
• Xfce’s panel insists on sitting in the right-hand VGA only. Other people are reporting the same behavior for Gnome’s panel and AFAIK, there’s no workaround available at the time being.

I have yet to try a 2560×800 (1280×800+1280×800) configuration but the current resolution is still more than sufficient for some kickass photo/video editing. Also, debugging on one display while vim-ing in the other is a programmer’s paradise. Size does matter, after all.

Tags: Dual-Head, Intel, Linux, Open Source, Technology, X, X.org, Xinerama, XRandR