Recently I told you that I was scrapping Windows. Well a few weeks down the line, I had a few problems with my multi-headed setup with my graphics card – the nVidia Geforce 7600 GT.
I installed the new version of openSuse without any problems; Setting up an Apache server with php, cgi and ruby on rails all in the drop of a hat (not a fedora here, sorry Dr. AAA).
On first boot it displayed only on one of the screens, giving a dark off-centre shadow on the other screen – oh fudge I thought.
A quick look on t’internet was no good, as the hard Linux nerds told me to get down and dirty in the X11 configuration files.
Before I even thought about considering this, I checked with nVidia themselves, and they gave me the closed-source Linux drivers – which didn’t download properly: parity errors. I then added the legendarily named ‘packman’ repository to YaST2 – openSuse’s software manager.
A quick tick of a box and the nVidia drivers installed. When I rebooted, a little pop-up box came up helpfully saying, ‘Multi-head configuration found. Would you like to enable it?’. openSuse you beautie! It was as simple as that.
As a whole, Linux treats two screen setups a hell of a lot better than Windows does – it is a lot smoother in maximising windows and video across both screens, much more considered controls and configuration, and the openGL effects look mental on it!
So there you have it, openSuse, Linux and nVidia on Linux all rock as far as dual-head configs go.