Ubuntu – Four monitor setup with two Nvidia graphics cards

multiple-monitorsnvidia

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 and I have two nVidia quadro 2000 video cards, each with two monitors plugged in (all 4 monitors are identical).

Now I have the latest nVidia drivers, and I'm trying to use the nVidia control panel to use all four monitors, and I can't get it to work.

Currently, my configuration is using TwinView to have 2 monitors per X screen. This doesn't work well because either

  1. i turn xinerama on, and nothing appears on the screen when I start a X session with Compiz enabled. Things only work in Ubuntu 2D.

  2. i turn xinerama off, and compiz works, but now, I cant drag windows between the two screens and i have no idea how to start applications in the other screen.

Is there a better way to configure my four monitor setup? Is there a way to get both GPUs onto a single X screen?

Best Answer

Your post is a bit old, but the answer might be useful to others. Since your post, there are even newer NVidia drivers which /kind of/ work for me. Xinerama works, but it's still buggy and I occasionally need to restart X ("service lightdm restart", or "service gdm restart" - depends on distro).

With Xinerama off, you have separate X screens. The mouse can move between them, but that's all. This is normal, and I can't tolerate it myself.

To start an application on the second screen (first screen is ":0.0", second screen is ":0.1"):

$ export DISPLAY=:0.1
$ xterm # or your application.
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