5 easy steps to enable dual screen in Ubuntu
I remember some time ago, it was really painful to get a fully working dual screen under linux.
I tried it today under Ubuntu and it worked quite straightforward. I was really impressed.
Here's how I did it. Ow, by the way, as I have an nVidia card, the manipulations described in this post are not intended to work on other types of cards.
Step 1 : Determine your graphic card type (is it an nVidia or not ?)
The most obvious way to get this information is to simply know it, but if you're like me you have probably already forgotten what type of graphic card you own and now, you need to know. This is simple, simply type "lspci" in a shell and in the output, look for a line that contains something like VGA compatible controller : nVidia Corporation XXX [blah blah blah].
If you don't find such a line, you'd better run outside and buy an nVidia card before reading further.
Step 2 : Install the 3D Drivers
It's just a matter of copying a line and pasting in your terminal :
sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
When you do this, Ubuntu may ask you for your password (because of the sudo), just give it to him and watch what it's doing.
On my machine, it complains like this :
Package nvidia-glx is a virtual package provided by: nvidia-glx-96 96.43.09-0ubuntu1 .... ... .. You should explicitly select one to install.
So let's do what it wants, I choose to select the most recent one (being nvidia-glx-185 at the time of this writing).
Accept everything it may ask you and everything should run fine.
Step 3 : Config part 1.
Simply launch
gksudo nvidia-settings
It will complain because you are not currently using the nvidia driver, that's exactly what we want for the moment, it will automatically backup and adapt your xorg.conf file.
Save and quit.
If you're using Ubuntu Karmic, it may not complain at all about the nvidia driver and you might well have no xorg.conf file. The absence of that file will be problematic when you'll want to save your brand new configuration, so if it does not already exist, create it now by typing
gksudo nvidia-xconfig
Step 4 : Plug your second screen and turn it on.
Does this really need any further explanation ? When this is done, restart your X server by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.
Step 5 : Config part 2.
Launch "gksudo nvidia-settings" again, go to the "X Server Display Configuration" activate your second screen, place it where you want it to be (left of, right of, above or under the first screen). I choose the TwinView configuration in order to have an extended desktop that goes on the two screens, but you may want a clone. Save, quit, and restart your X server again.
Congratulations, you should now be able to work with two working screens.
