Tales From The Geek Side

It’s been a long time since I’ve run a Linux machine in a multi-head setup.  Much to my surprise (and delight) a lot has changed.  Unfortunately there’s still a lot of information out there on setting things up the old way but not a lot on setting things up the new way.

The old way is specifying Devices and Screens and using Xinerama and using directives like RightOf and LeftOf in your xorg.conf.  The new way moves all of this stuff out of xorg.conf and shifts the responsibility to xrandr which will configure screens and devices at runtime and can do so completely dynamically.

So the basic steps are just to get xorg up and running, which should work by default, tweak your xorg.conf slightly, and then run xrandr at the beginning of your X session to configure your displays to your liking. Read the rest of this entry »