Mindstab.net

So Gnome 2.14 and Xorg 7.0 hit stable on Gentoo so I upgraded Inferno to them. Finally. And not with out the odd glitch. Mostly to do with xorg 7.0 and nvidia and twin view. Still, I got it done.

The problems manifested in twinview not working (only one monitor), or twinview working but less resolution than I could get. So I googled. And the results are in.

First, Gentoo is moving to a new simpler ebuild for Nvidia, so "emerge -C nvidia-kernel nvidia-glx" to get rid of the old ones. The new one is nvidia-drivers and it's marked unstable because it's the ~1.0.87xx line. No worries. Seems good enough to me. So "ACCEPT_KEYWORDS='~x86" emerge nvidia-drivers".

Then, make a fresh xorg.conf with "Xorg -configure". Then copy it from /root/xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and you'll probably need to manually fix the mouse entry ;) (so backup your current xorg.conf first). Then the setting up twinview.

xorg.conf

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
        VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
        ModelName    "Monitor Model"
        # manually specify refresh rates
        # and keep the low end low enough for high resolution
        HorizSync       30-64
        VertRefresh     50-120
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Card0"
        Driver      "nvidia"
        VendorName  "nVidia Corporation"
        BoardName   "NV35 [GeForce FX 5900]"
        BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
        # EDID detection apparently may not be working right
        # with nvidia drivers so we want to specify refresh
        # rates manually
        Option "UseEDID" "FALSE"
        Option      "TwinView" "true"
        #RightOf or Clone
        Option  "TwinViewOrientation"   "RightOf"
        Option      "MetaModes"      "1280x1024,1280x1024; 1024x768,1024x768;"
        Option          "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "30-70"
        Option          "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "50-180"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Card0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
             # Xorg server is now smart enough to calculate the view area on its own
             # so you specify modes in parts now
             Modes                "1280x1024,1280x1024" "1024x768,1024x768"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

And tada, New Xorg 7.0 with the latest Nvidia drivers and Twinview.

Note: You may need a newish kernel for this... or not. I'm running 2.6.16.19 for the record.

Update (2006.07.19): Oh yeah, I forgot. It's likely you'll want to have composite on but netscape-flash in firefox crashes. To gt around this edit /usr/bin/firefox and add export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 . Should look something like this in the end (and don't forget to do this when you upgrade firefox too ;) )

/usr/bin/firefox

#!/bin/sh

export MOZILLA_LAUNCHER=firefox-bin
export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1
exec /usr/libexec/mozilla-launcher