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#1 2011-08-06 01:11:52

Tempest
Member
Registered: 2011-08-01
Posts: 22

[SOLVED] Dual-Screen Setup with ATI Catalyst

I'm having a beast of a time trying to set up X to work on my two screens.

Screen 1 is a 23" screen connected with a DVI cable.  My preferred resolution for this one is 1920x1080.  Screen 2 is a 17" screen (4:3) connected with a VGA cable.  My preferred resolution for this one is 1280x960.

I tried using "aticonfig --initial=dual-head".  This does not produce a working xorg.conf file.  Specifically, my smaller monitor simply complains about not being able to display the given video mode.  Running xrandr (from the main screen) shows only that output as being "connected" - the rest of them (including the CRT outputs which seem to correspond to the VGA port) as "disconnected".

I've spent about 5 hours searching for an answer to this, and the only ones I seem to be able to find are nvidia-specific.

I have an ATI Radeon HD 4850 or 4870 - I honestly forget which, although the drivers should be the same.  I'm using the catalyst driver from the AUR, because I'd like to have 3D acceleration.

I've read through the entire xorg.conf man page, and tried a few things from there (including writing my own xorg.conf from scratch).  Unfortunately, this seems incredibly useless, as the man page doesn't list any of the options that I seem to need (for example, I've read about and tried the "PairModes" option under "Device").

I can probably eventually figure this out, but it would be nice to have a few pointers.  For example:

Should I have one or two "Device" sections in xorg.conf?  Should I have one or two "Screen" sections in xorg.conf?  Where can I find a full list of possible "Option" keys, at least for the Device section?  Should I be using Xinerama (I've tried with and without, to no avail).

EDIT:  I solved this by using the aticonfig tool some more, and not by messing around with xorg.conf.  Specifically, the command:

aticonfig --initial=dual-head --xinerama=on --resolution=0,1920x1080 --resolution=1,1280x960 --screen-layout=right

I'll leave this here in the hopes that it can help someone else.

Last edited by Tempest (2011-08-06 02:28:41)

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#2 2011-08-06 02:34:40

BurntSushi
Member
From: Massachusetts
Registered: 2009-06-28
Posts: 362
Website

Re: [SOLVED] Dual-Screen Setup with ATI Catalyst

If you aren't playing games, it may be worth it to check out xf86-video-ati. Then you can configure your displays the standard way with xrandr.


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