This week’s TechMail is Dodge the challenges of a dual-head display setup with Fedora 10 which discusses setting up a dual-head display on my Lenovo T61 and how insanely easy it ended up being… once I knew what I was doing. Truth be told, I haven’t setup a dual-head display on Linux in years. However, being used to a multi-display system (I’ve got 4 monitors hooked up to my mac), working on a single laptop screen all day just didn’t cut it, so I had to figure this out in a hurry.
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You don’t have to power anything down to re-arrange the displays, you can do it hot with the command line ‘randr’ utility, or the GUI gnome-display-properties applet. You can enable or disable either head or re-arrange them, and the desktop will be redrawn appropriately.
It’s worth noting that, in my experience, GNOME handles on-the-fly updating of multiple monitor setups substantially better than KDE does. KDE kind of screws it up – your taskbar will often wind up all over the shop, fullscreen windows don’t behave right, etc.
er, xrandr, not randr.
Slick. On a quick glance, xrandr looks pretty useful. I’m going to have to look into that closer. Thanks for the tip!