On Sat, 28 Nov 2009, Florin Iucha wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 08:26:55PM -0600, Mike Miller wrote:
>
>> I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 on AMD64 with Nvidia driver and GeForce 7600 
>> card.
>
> Are you using the free driver or the binary nvidia driver?

When I tried to do something with "Display" in Ubuntu's system panel, it 
told me that it was unable to make changes and I should try the 
proprietary controls.  So I looked on the same list of apps and found the 
Nvidia panel.


>> I was using two 1680x1050 monitors, but I dropped the first one and 
>> replaced it with a DVI-to-HDMI cable to my 1920x1080 HDTV.  I'm having 
>> a problem configuring this properly.  I want two separate X screens. 
>> I can only get it to work with both at 1680x1050.  In fact, if I change 
>> the HDTV setting to be 1920x1080, it reverts to 1680x1050.  If I 
>> disable the second monitor and use only the HDTV and tell it to use 
>> 1920x1080, if I get it to do that (or get both X/Nvidia and the HDTV to 
>> say that's what they are doing), a lot of the desktop is off the edges 
>> of the screen and not visible.
>
> Is this with the nvidia control panel utilities, or with Ubuntu/X.org 
> ones?

Nvidia.  What I've been doing is telling Nvidia to write to xorg.conf, 
then I restart and see how it looks.  This has almost worked!


>> There is something called Xinerama.  If I enable Xinerama, nothing 
>> works (I think I was getting no X) and it tells me that RANDR is not 
>> available.
>
> Xinerama is obsolete, RANDR is the new way forward, but I'm not sure if 
> nvidia proprietary driver supports it.

Well, do I need to be using Nvidia's proprietary driver?  I'd rather use 
all free software, definitely, but I'll do what I have to do to make the 
hardware work.  If I can use RANDR with a different driver, I guess that's 
what I'd prefer to do.

Mike