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  • #31
    Originally posted by Chewi View Post
    1) Not really. I didn't have this with fglrx and I don't really need it. It would be nice to have though.

    2) MythTV is very important to me, I record and watch almost all my TV with it.

    I'm having another go now. Will try Xephyr shortly. There's another issue that I forgot to mention. My second monitor is actually a TV capable of 1920x1080. My primary monitor is only capable of 1280x1024. When I set a virtual desktop size of 3200x1080, my bottom XFCE panel does correctly sit at the bottom of the screen (it's not cut off) but auto-hide is broken because when I move my mouse to the bottom, it doesn't appear. I have to make it always show. Maybe this is an XFCE bug but this is another reason why I'd prefer proper Zaphod mode.
    Okay,

    The two fundamental modes that you can use are

    1) multi-head/single-GPU - called Zaphod (but increasingly incorrect with the AMD >2 display cards coming out).

    This mode leaves you with two X heads, :0.0 and :0.1 which are more or less independent universes. With fglrx, you can do "aticonfig --initial=dual-head" and it should just light up.

    2) RANDR 1.2

    This mode gives you two viewports over a single surface and the ability to size and position independently. Benefit is configurability, disadvantage is application support. If you are using a RANDR 1.3 capable distribution, you can also set "--primary" to provide a hint to gnome-panel et al about which monitor is your "center of the universe".

    Disadvantage here is that applications are mostly naive when it comes to multi-monitor modes. They may listen to the xinerama extension and place things intelligently, they may not. This goes right up and down the stack.

    With fglrx, the only caveat here is that you need to set the virtual size to the max bounding square of a desktop that you care about. Then layouts should work.

    If you go with this mode, you are likely to get quirks with apps, and to resolve those quirks you probably need to work upstream with the apps to get it going how you would like it.

    Regards,

    Matthew

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    • #32
      Sorry but I do know all that. I've been saying that I can't get Zaphod mode to work with xf86-video-ati. I gave xrandr a try because it seems to be enough for most people but evidently not for me.

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      • #33
        Originally posted by Chewi View Post
        Sorry but I do know all that. I've been saying that I can't get Zaphod mode to work with xf86-video-ati. I gave xrandr a try because it seems to be enough for most people but evidently not for me.
        I understand, since you indicate you have a Radeon HD 4xxx, you can at least confirm behaviour as described above with fglrx. I can attest that there has been a lot of work on the multi-head/randr usage recently on the fglrx side.

        Regards,

        Matthew

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        • #34
          fglrx has worked well for me in this respect for a long time now but I still have the usual problems like instability and video tearing. I am very keen to make the transition to the open drivers.

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          • #35
            zaphod mode does not work with acceleration on xf86-video-ati. If you want accel and multi-head, you need to use xrandr.

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            • #36
              You said this back in April so I was under the impression it would work now?

              It's a fairly complex fix. The problem is the current drm system only supports a single master, so you could probably get the dri working with one head. For zaphod with dri on all heads, you'll need the latest kms/mm drm and such. Fedora 11 has the necessary bits. In the meantime you could use something like xephyr to simulate zaphod over randr dualhead.

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              • #37
                Originally posted by Chewi View Post
                You said this back in April so I was under the impression it would work now?
                It might work with kms, but I haven't tried it.

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                • #38
                  I was using KMS. I guess I should file a bug report? I was actually about to before you replied.

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                  • #39
                    Originally posted by Chewi View Post
                    I was using KMS. I guess I should file a bug report? I was actually about to before you replied.
                    yes, please do.

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                    • #40
                      The bug report is at http://bugs.freedesktop.org/24523.

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