Linux – Use NVIDIA and ATI cards in the same Linux computer

amd radeonlinuxnvidia-quadroxorg

I've got the following graphics cards installed in my computer:

$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon HD 4770 [RV740]
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G86 [Quadro NVS 290] (rev a1)

I've also got both the "radeon" and "nouveau" drivers installed. The problem is, only the displays on the ATI card get enabled. I don't see anything in the kernel log about the nvidia card, except for:

[    0.137806] vgaarb: device added: PCI:0000:03:00.0,decodes=io+mem,owns=none,locks=none

If I add the options to the kernel to disable nouveau, it shows the splash screen on the NVIDIA card but after that there is no display on it.

This same setup works fine in Windows with both the NVIDIA and ATI drivers installed. Any ideas?

Best Answer

The last time I needed to do this, I had to run two separate X sessions, made by having multiple Screen sections in xorg.conf, and it involved a lot of cussing. There's been a bit of overhaul to xorg since I had to do that, but I can't imagine what you need to do is too different (other than I think that by default xorg doesn't actually spit out a conf file anymore).

See the Gentoo Wiki article, which went offline, but is still available on the Wayback Machine. particularly the xorg.conf examples right below that anchor. If that doesn't help, or doesn't help much, pastebin your xorg.conf, or the contents of xorgs configuration directory, and I'll see if I can help get you closer.

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