[wplug] compositing in metacity

Patrick Wagstrom patrick at wagstrom.net
Tue Nov 18 21:07:54 EST 2008


On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 7:16 PM, Michael Semcheski <mhsemcheski at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 5:34 PM, E. Brian Doran <ebdoran at comcast.net>
> wrote:
> > If anyone has any insight as to the progression of this topic please let
> me
> > know.  I had heard that xrandr1.3 may suppot multiple GPU's etc.  Also
> > googles summer of code had an entry for getting this to work but I
> believe no
> > one was awarded.
>
> Interesting problem.  My low-end nvidia card has no trouble with two
> monitors, but I have no idea how I would go about adding a third.
>
> We have a computer in my lab with 5 monitors on it using nvidia, but
> alas, its Windows.
>

The issue with the nVidia drivers is that the hardware makes it an either/or
proposition.  You can have either compositing or xinerama, but you cannot
have both, at least with the nVidia driver.  The xorg people point the
finger at nVidia and nVidia points the finger at xorg.  In any case, using
xinearama is essentially deprecated in favor of xrandr1.2 which does all
sorts of wacky stuff, like rearranging monitors on the fly, partial monitor
overlap, hotplugging output devices.  If you've ever had to give a
presentation with a laptop, xrandr1.2 is a godsend.

I'm inclined to believe it's nVidia's fault. The intel drivers and newer
opensource ati drivers have no problem with this.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.wplug.org/pipermail/wplug/attachments/20081118/c3f8d93e/attachment.html 


More information about the wplug mailing list