NVIDIA Multihead Guide for Linux Laptops

featured, misc

I’ve had a hard time finding comprehensive information about setting up an extra monitor with my laptop; I’m collecting everything I’ve figured out here. If you have other tips, experiences or suggestions please post them.

These instructions assume you are using the beta drivers 169.04 or better (available here). It’s possible that they will work for other driver sets as well, but I haven’t tested them.

nvidia-settings

This program a swiss army knife for all of your display settings. It is installed with the driver and invoked as nvidia-settings from a CLI or in System Tools > NVIDIA X Server Settings. Of particular use is the X Server Display Configuration Page, which allows you to set up your monitors in any arrangement you want.

None of the following instructions do anything that you can’t do using this tool, but it can be a hassle to have to page through all the settings when you just want to turn on another monitor, and I’ve found that it generates xorg.conf files unintelligently and can mess up some of your other system settings. However, when all else fails you can always use nvidia-settings.

XRandR

XRandR (X Resize and Rotate) is an X extension that allows you to dynamically change the size and orientation of your desktop. It can be used to make on-the-fly changes to your resolution and monitor setup.

TwinView

TwinView is NVIDIA’s system for allowing your desktop to span multiple monitors. TwinView is not Xinerama (the standard X “big desktop” solution), but it can pretend to be in order to pass correct information to your window manager.

Configuring xorg.conf

I have found a very simple xorg.conf setup to produce the most useful multimonitor configuration. To your “Device” section, simply add:

Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0"
Option "MetaModes" "CRT: nvidia-auto-select, DFP: nvidia-auto-select"


This tells the driver to:

1. Enable twinview
2. Make your laptop’s screen the primary monitor
3. Automatically choose the best screen configuration when X is started

With this setup, your desktop will automatically extend across onto an external monitor if one is connected, and keep your display limited to the laptop’s LCD if there is no other screen. With this setup, all you have to do is plug in your new screen and restart X to get a good TwinView configuration

Dynamic TwinView

If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to restart X every time you change display configurations, the driver also makes a “Dynamic TwinView” extension available. If you plug in the new monitor after X has started, the computer won’t know that the screen exists and so can’t extend on to it. There are two ways of forcing a re-scan of available displays: using the previously mentioned nvidia-settings tool, or by using a smaller command-line utility called nv-control-dvc that comes with the nvidia-settings-source package.

To get nv-control-dvc, download the nvidia-settings source package (‘apt-get source nvidia-settings’ on Debian-based distros) and run ‘make’ in the samples directory. You can then make a launcher that calls ‘nv-control-dvc –dynamic-twinview’ that will give you access to new monitors whenever they are connected.

After a new monitor has been detected, you can enable it by opening your favorite resolution-changing program and selecting the resolution that is the combined size of the combined desktops.

A note for compiz-fusion users: this will incorrectly broadcast the size of your screen, and compiz will end up trying to maximize your windows across two desktops. You can manually set your screen configuration with gconf-editor in ‘/apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/outputs’.

Cloning output (“presentation mode”)

Compiz users can use the “clone” tool to mirror one display on another; at the moment I don’t know of any other way of doing this without setting the other screen’s position to “Clone” in nvidia-settings.

[6 comments]

Midrasha Graduation Speech

personal, writing

How can you say, “I am not defiled,
I have not gone after the Baalim”?
Look at your deeds in the Valley
Consider what you have done!
Like a lustful she-camel,
Restlessly running about [...]

Jeremiah 2:23

“Israel,” the prophet Jeremiah declares, “is a lustful she-camel.” In the company of so many complex and meaningful quotes from Pirke Avot Jeremiah’s dromedary is an admittedly unpromising way to start this graduation, but if there is one thing I have learned from Midrasha it is that wisdom manifests itself in the most unexpected places. So please bear with me for a moment.

Midrasha, too, is a lustful she-camel; like the camel, Midrasha has its ups and its downs.

And, having successfully convinced Rabbi Chester that I’m not doing anything obscene with this speech, let’s talk about lust. After all, Midrasha is nothing if it is not hormonal, and I would go so far as to argue that this is the defining characteristic of our relationship with our faith as much as it is with our peers. Yes, it is lust that keeps the women on Kesher retreats awake into the late hours of the night listening rapt as Emma Rosenthal reads the naughty bits of Cosmopolitan, and lust that causes the men of Kesher to try to join in those readings, but it is lust also that wakes us up early in the morning for services, and lust that has carried us to this stage today. The more time I have spent in this community the more I have seen that our ordinary teenage hungers pale in comparison to the spiritual hunger that brings every one of us back week after week. To look at a Kesher Havdalah service is to observe a group of students not thoughtfully committed to the practice of their religion, but caught up in a wild passion. We weep, we sigh, we moan: ours is a practice of tears and sweat and fire. There are teachers here to whose every word we cling desperately; there are lessons that keep us awake at night. We lust after Midrasha.

This graduation marks not only the end of our time at Midrasha but a fundamental change in the nature of our religious observance. The Hillels we’re going to be spending time in next year will not give us the same freedom or diversity of experience that we’ve so been privileged to have these past five years, and at some point in the future we’ll have to settle down and find another congregation of our own. But my hope at this graduation is that we never lose completely that lust that has held us captive to this place and these people since the eighth grade; that our Judaism is always passionate, always a little wild, that even as we go on our way, each and every one of us remains, at least a little bit, a lustful camel.

[10 comments]

Smashing Textures Contest Entry

photos

texture.stucco.jpg

The Smashing Textures Contest is awarding a free Canon Digital Rebel DSLR to a random entrant in their texture contest.

Stucco is beautiful.

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7 projects every Linux user should try

misc

The recent focus on making GNU/Linux accessible to the average desktop user, and in particular the efforts of the Ubuntu distribution, have created a flood of new Linux users. I really believe that this a wonderful thing for the Linux community, but one of the unfortunate consequences has been that not everybody really understands how to use their computer anymore – it’s not uncommon now to find postings on support forums where users say things like “i rly rly want my computer to do teh pretty thing but i dont no how and im scared of the black screen with the blinky white line what do i do?”

Naturally, this is a bit of an extreme case, but the computer literacy of the average Linux user does seem to be declining. While this is an inevitable consequence of making the OS more widely available, it’s also one that is easily remedied – most of the basic skills people lack can easily be picked up with a little exploration.

What follows is a list of useful tweaks and projects that are also instructive in the fundamentals of operating a Linux desktop. This list is not meant to be a full tutorial, but rather a jumping-off point for each of these projects—after all, the point is to learn by doing these things. Similarly, many tutorials discovered in the course of trying to do these will provide lists of command or bits of code; rather than mindlessly typing them in it’s worth making an effort to understand what they do.

Feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated. Enjoy! (more…)

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