Linux – how to make dual monitors work as separate monitors and not duplicate? Linux mint 14

linux-mintmulti-monitornvidia

I am using Linux Mint 14 with xfce.

I have 2 monitors: LG and Samsung. One is attached to digital input and one to VGA input cable.

NVidia graphics card. The 2 monitors come up OK, and I see the Linux desktop on both of them just fine.

The problem is that they are duplicates of each other. Kinda' useless. Anything I do on one monitor appears exactly on the second monitor.

I would like to change this so that I can have one as primary monitor and the second one to use by dragging windows to it when I run out of space on my primary monitor. I set this very easily on Windows, but is hard to do on Linux.

I researched this, and one is supposed to run a program called nvidia-setting to configure this. But when I do

sudo nvidia-setting

I get a message saying 

   You do not appear to be using the NVIDIA X driver.  Please edit your 
   X configuration file (just run `nvidia-xconfig` as root), and 
   restart the X server.

I have no idea what this means. I do not know how to edit configurations files. Edit them to do what?

But even when I try the command above

>sudo nvidia-xconfig
sudo: nvidia-xconfig: command not found

I looked in the package manager, and searched and do not see this program.
I searched also:

>aptitude search nvidia | grep -i config
i   nvidia-settings                 - Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics d
p   nvidia-settings:i386            - Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics d
p   nvidia-settings-experimental-30 - Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics dr
p   nvidia-settings-experimental-30 - Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics dr
p   nvidia-settings-experimental-31 - Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics d
p   nvidia-settings-experimental-31 - Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics d
p   nvidia-settings-updates         - Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics d
p   nvidia-settings-updates:i386    - Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics d
>

and

>apt search nvidia-xconfig
>

You can see that there is no such program out there in the Linux Mint 14 xfce repository. This package is available for Debian

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/nvidia-xconfig

Any idea what to do now? Here are the specs:

lspci
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G98 [GeForce 8400 GS] (rev a1)

xrandr command output

>xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 8192 x 8192
DVI-I-1 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 510mm x 290mm
   1920x1080      59.9 +   60.0  
   1680x1050      59.9  
   1680x945       60.0  
   1400x1050      59.9  
   1600x900       60.0  
   1280x1024      75.0*    60.0  
   1440x900       75.0     59.9  
   1280x960       60.0  
   1366x768       60.0  
   1360x768       60.0  
   1280x800       74.9     59.9  
   1152x864       75.0  
   1280x768       74.9     60.0  
   1024x768       75.1     70.1     60.0  
   1024x576       60.0  
   832x624        74.6  
   800x600        72.2     75.0     60.3     56.2  
   848x480        60.0  
   640x480        72.8     75.0     60.0  
   720x400        70.1  
VGA-1 connected 1280x1024+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 509mm x 286mm
   1920x1080      60.0 +
   1600x1200      60.0  
   1680x1050      60.0  
   1680x945       60.0  
   1400x1050      60.0  
   1600x900       60.0  
   1280x1024      75.0     60.0* 
   1440x900       75.0     59.9  
   1280x960       60.0  
   1366x768       60.0  
   1360x768       60.0  
   1280x800       74.9     59.8  
   1152x864       75.0  
   1280x768       74.9     59.9  
   1024x768       75.1     70.1     60.0  
   1024x576       60.0  
   832x624        74.6  
   800x600        72.2     75.0     60.3     56.2  
   848x480        60.0  
   640x480        72.8     75.0     66.7     60.0  
   720x400        70.1

Best Answer

Go to administration -> software sources and search for nvidia-current. Install and restart, run sudo nvidia-settings again.

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