average admins

I finally had a chance to install FreeBSD on my work desktop today. I have been working on my FreeBSD laptop for the past 2 weeks or so and with the help of Win4BSD I can do everything I need.

Today after work I spent a little time trying to get a dual-head setup for my X desktop. I mean, it’s cute and all when one monitor clones the other one but it doesn’t really make good use of two 17″ flat panels and a dual-head video card. I went through a number of configs, changing this, adding or removing that, and nothing seemed to be working. I had some pretty strange setups from time to time where my desktop would be spread across both monitors, I could swing my mouse from one to the other, but I had two taskbars in Fluxbox and when I pulled up the right-click menu, it would display on both screens. At one point I also had the same setup I just mentioned but when I would move my mouse to the left monitor the mouse cursor disappeared and I had a big light blue square with which to use as a pointer… and it wouldn’t do anything. It wouldn’t pull up the right-click menu, move through the workspaces by clicking the numbers and arrows on the taskbar, nothing.

Right before I gave up and left for the weekend I found this article. Reading this guy’s work shows his level of frustration with the man pages for the different applications and drivers as well as the support he was receiving from the community. In the end, he got his setup working and I gave it a try also.

I made some minor changes to my existing xorg.conf and this is what I came up with:

# /etc/xorg.conf - 2006-09-29
        Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "X.org Configured"
        Screen         "Screen0" 0 0
        Screen          "Screen1" LeftOf "Screen0"
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Files"
        RgbPath      "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
        ModulePath   "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/CID/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
        FontPath     "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load  "extmod"
        Load  "glx"
        Load  "dri"
        Load  "dbe"
        Load  "record"
        Load  "xtrap"
        Load  "type1"
        Load  "freetype"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse0"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option      "Protocol" "auto"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
        Option      "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        #DisplaySize      340   270     # mm
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
        VendorName   "DEL"
        ModelName    "DELL E171FP"
        HorizSync    30.0 - 80.0
        VertRefresh  56.0 - 76.0
        Option          "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Card0"
        Driver      "ati"
        VendorName  "ATI Technologies Inc"
        BoardName   "RV370 5B64 [FireGL V3100 (PCIE)]"
        BusID       "PCI:5:0:0"
        Option      "MergedFB" "True"
        Option      "EnablePageFlip" "True"
        Option      "AGPMode" "4"
        Option      "AGPFastWrite" "True"
        Option      "MergedXineramaCRTIsScreen0" "True"
        Option      "CRT2Position" "LeftOf"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Card1"
        Driver          "ati"
        VendorName      "ATI Technologies Inc"
        BoardName       "RV370 5B64 [FireGL V3100 (PCIE)]"
        BusID           "PCI:5:0:1"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Card0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth 24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes     "1280x1024"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen1"
        Device     "Card1"
        Monitor    "Monitor1"
        DefaultDepth 24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
                Modes     "1280x1024"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
        Mode    0666
EndSection

I saved my changes, fired off startx and was impressed when it worked the first time! I made some minor changes to my Fluxbox configuration to move the taskbar to the bottom left of the screen, changed the size of it, etc. and everything works as expected! Nice!

I am about to do an install on my desktop at home which is using the ATI Radeon X800. I will attempt to use the same config (minus device specific options and entries) and have a feeling, maybe I shouldn’t, that it will work like a champ. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Until next time…

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 6:50 pm and is filed under FreeBSD, X Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.