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3000003

Member

Registered: 2012-04-15

Posts: 3

Two monitors cannot swap sockets?

I have two monitors, one is HP2229h and the other is Dell U221HM. The graphic card is nVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti.

All worked fine until I switched from proprietary driver to Nouveau yesterday.

Now the working connection is to have HP to the first socket of the nVidia card and Dell the second -- I can boot and run X (with awesome-wm).

The weird thing is if I switch the two sockets, Dell to the first socket and HP the second, then I cannot successfully boot. After GRUB, a few lines prompt as normal, but then everything just blacks out. Neither monitors further receive signals. However, the system seems still successfully loaded -- I can blindly login and run something that plays a sound -- but just no display.

It comes to me weird because by the time they blackout no specific settings about monitors should have been loaded yet. Neither early or late start of Nouveau works. Switching back to the proprietary driver solves the problem. Does any one know why this happens?

Maybe related: In the HP-first, Dell-second connection, after I started X, if I switch to tty2-6 or simply quit awesome-wm, I get black screens with no signals. Normally I should go back to console.

McDoenerKing

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2010-06-21

Posts: 59

Re: Two monitors cannot swap sockets?

As far as I know for switching and positioning monitors you're looking for "xrandr"

xrandr --output VGA1 --left-of VGA2 # this puts VGA1 left of VGA2

Just run xrandr to see what modes are available and how the monitors are named.

As fas as Nouveau goes: The open driver is behind supporting newer hardware so for now you should use the proprietary until Nouveau supports it properly.
When you're using the proprietary driver you can use "nvidia-settings" to configure everything. Run it as root if you want to save the configuration.

Last edited by McDoenerKing (2012-04-15 07:01:55)

3000003

Member

Registered: 2012-04-15

Posts: 3

Re: Two monitors cannot swap sockets?

McDoenerking:

As far as I know for switching and positioning monitors you're looking for "xrandr"

I do not think that has anything to do with the problem. The problem, put in short, is that when I switch the sockets of the two monitors, Nouveau driver cannot display anything even though the boot seems successful. X has not be run by then. xrandr does not seem suspicious to me at all.

As fas as Nouveau goes: The open driver is behind supporting newer hardware so for now you should use the proprietary until Nouveau supports it properly.
When you're using the proprietary driver you can use "nvidia-settings" to configure everything. Run it as root if you want to save the configuration.

This I tend to agree. So this is a driver problem?

McDoenerKing

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2010-06-21

Posts: 59

Re: Two monitors cannot swap sockets?

@3000003
I was just giving you an answer how to swap your output in a workaround way. To the issue of having a black screen when switching sockets I sadly can't comment. Maybe checking through your /var/log/ files can reveal something.

3000003

Member

Registered: 2012-04-15

Posts: 3

Re: Two monitors cannot swap sockets?

@McDoenerKing

Thanks for the advice. But I haven't found anything useful from log files. The boot logs apparently read identical, whether I change the sockets or not. I will think about it...