Mint 12 Dual Monitor Setup

[Old_Mil]

So I'm running an older P4 system with an AGP Nvidia Geforce 7600 video card. The card has VGA and DVI output. I've been running with a 23 inch HP 2310m monitor in native resolution off the DVI port for a while with no problems. Added a second monitor, a 20 inch HP 2009m to the VGA port. Turned the machine on, and mirroring during the BIOS tests worked fine. Machine was slower to boot, but eventually came up with the login screen on the 23 inch screen on the left. The 20 inch screen remained black. Logged in, and it seemed to mirror OK, pulling up the standard Linux Mint wallpaper as it was logging in but at some point during the login the second screen went white and although I could pull the mouse pointer onto it, I couldn't drag a window onto it. Also, the upper and lower borders of the left screen, with the menu did not show.

Ran nvidia-settings from terminal and both monitors seemed to be recognized OK with appropriate resolutions assigned.

Any thoughts?

[Old_Mil]

Right now I'm running with a single screen hooked up. According to nvidia-settings I have

X screen information

Screen Number 0
1920x1080
95x94 dots per inch
depth 24
GPUs Geforce 7600 GS (GPU 0)
Displays HP 2310 (DFP-0)
Errors: 0
Stereo Mode: Unknown

When I did this with two screens hooked up, this displayed the correct information for both, but the second screen went to all white after a brief flash of the standard mint wallpaper.

[Daikini]

Hi Old Mill,

I am running into a similar issue.

I have a laptop that I dock and extend the desktop to an external VGA monitor.

Because I couldn't find a solution a couple of weeks ago, I've had to mirror the desktop, killing some valuable monitor space.

I tried using Gnome3, Gnome Classic, and Cinnamon. Gnome Classic handles it best, (I get the window header bars back) but still no menu (Applications / Places).

In Cinnamon, I lost all desktop icons and all panels. I tried changing settings in Randr and in Display. Neither has fixed the issue.

Any ideas, folks?

[Old_Mil]

Well, I seem to have stumbled across a solution. Today I upgraded from the old PATA 40gb drive in my machine to a SATA 120gb SSD. Used that as an excuse to do a fresh install of Mint with both monitors hooked up...and it worked. Updated everything and it worked fine. Both monitors were recognized, and I could change resolutions. Then I made the mistake of downloading and installing the proprietary Nvidia driver. Upon reboot, only the monitor hooked up to the VGA port was functioning (the one hooked up to the DVI port went to sleep) and the machine had lost the ability to recognize the type of monitor.

Anyone know how to undo this without another clean install? Or, better yet, get the proprietary driver to drive both screens?

Thanks

[beachgardener]

i had problems with nvidia driver on 13 rc cinnamon, stuffed things up, just uninstalled it (deactivated nvidia drivers) rebooted and all is well, just not using nvidia driver now (will see how things go after final is out), both screens work well, but do check the nvidia control centre you might be able to turn it on in there.

[Daikini]

I tried removing nvidia-common and I still have the same issue. I'm using the nouveau driver and making adjustments via randr and Display.

I'd rather not do a fresh install if it's avoidable...

[Daikini]

Hi All,

For now I just installed MATE and it works fine with dual monitors. No eye candy, but I'd rather have it work than not!

So, that's a temporary "fix" until (hopefully) a real solution comes around for GNOME and/or Cinnamon.

[yet_one_more_curious]

Under Windows monitor Mirroring and audio via HDMI (out to receiver>HD TV) work just fine.

Under Cinnamon (as well as Ubuntu 12.04) if Nouveau driver is used Mirroring works fine, but audio is absent (even though HDMI audio devices are listed - none of them producing sound via HDMI.

When Nvidia Linux driver is installed Mirroring isn't working at all (it's called Separate X Screen View Mode in Nvidia configuration utility), while Twin-View mode works fine and there IS working HDMI audio in Twin-View Mode!

I think that a Twin-View Mode is only usable when two monitors are placed on the same desk, but if a second monitor located in another room then Twin-View Mode is useless.

My TV is in another room and I hoped to watch and control my laptop from that room with Linux installed.
Under Windows it is easy with HDMI: Mirroring is right there, audio works fine. I use my Android phone with a Wi-Fi app that mimics touch-pad and installed in Windows OS server program.
This setup allows me to control my laptop from another room: I watch the laptop 1080P screen mirrored to my 60" Panasonic TV 1080P screen and listen to Hi-Res audio as well.

I guess that Linux is still isn't ready for home use..
How many years this OS is around? 15?, 20?
Sad.

If I could possibly hack Nvidia HDMI driver to implement required audio settings/conf files into Linux running with Nouveau driver I could possibly resolve this my "No HDMI Audio" issue.
Hacking Nouveau video settings into Linux Nvidia driver to combine Nouveaus ability to mirror with Nvidias ability to produce HDMI sound would also be excellent, but i don't know how to do this, or if this even possible.

Is there anybody who knows how to resolve this issue?
Your help would be greatly appreciated.

[martolives]

The problem I've been having has been similar to this, and I think I've found where the problem is, but haven't worked out a fix for it yet. However, I have developed a work-around. Now, I should add here that I'm still relatively new to the Linux scene, and while I'm learning fast, I might get some of the terminology very wrong in the following explanation.

When I first set up Mint 12, and plugged in my monitor, it didn't come on at all. I used the basic "configure display settings" icon in the top of the screen to bring it on, but it seemed to get confused. It would mess up the resolution I was trying to put in for the second monitor, my desktop icons would disappear, and other random crazy things would happen.

So, eventually, it was so messed up, I restarted, and had my laptop monitor working fine but the second monitor blank. I decided to do it manually, and opened terminal and applied my limited xrandr knowledge with the following command:

xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1280x1024 --right-of LVDS1

It worked perfectly, and I went about my business with two working monitors. I shut down that night happy that I had solved my problem.

However, when I booted up the next day, it only booted my laptop monitor. It displays a mirror on the second monitor for log on, but once I log on and bring up the desktop, the second monitor is a no-go. So, to play it safe, I just did what I knew would work - I ran the command again, and it worked just fine.

The next day, I had to unplug my laptop to take it to my router and make an ethernet connection, so, to be safe, I ran the following command.

xrandr --output VGA1 --off

It turned off the second monitor... but all my icons disappeared again. I was very annoyed. I thought I'd search this problem on here, and needed my browser, so I tapped the cursor to the top-left of my screen to bring up that shell overlay thing to get to Google Chrome, and as I did, I noticed my icons flicker on briefly, then disappear as the overlay came up... I tapped the corner again, and again, as the overlay retracted, there were the icons. Briefly.

On a hunch, I ran the following

killall nautilus
nautilus -n

And my icons came back.

So, I'm pretty sure there's a bug in Nautilus that is at fault here. Something related to Gnome 3 as well, because my brother runs Mint 12 with XFCE and doesn't have this problem at all.

In the meantime, I've created two executable text files, like scripts really, as work-arounds

The first one, called "multimonitor", runs the following:

#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1280x1024 --right-of LVDS1


And the second, called "single monitor", runs the following

#!/bin/bash
xrandr --output VGA1 --off
killall nautilus
nautilus -n &

They are both icons on my desktop. When I log on, I just run "multimonitor" to get my second monitor up. When I need to unplug my laptop for whatever reason and it's still turned on, I can run the "single monitor" script.

I might just add, too, that I'm switching to Xubuntu 12.04 soon cuz it's an LTS release, so it's all kind of moot for me, but I hope it helps to some degree. And obviously, if you use my work around, you may have a different screen size to consider.

[yet_one_more_curious]

Still waiting for the reply...
Sad thing is that there even might be a possibility to do that, which probably even exists already in "Nvidia X server Setting"!
Maybe it is even not very hard to set X server display configuration with "Nvidia X server Settings" to watch a TV connected to a PC via HDMI with "separate Xscreens" when one screen is a clone of another...
If you only know how...
What I know for sure is that it is very easy to mess things up in Linux, if you don't know what you doing...
It is just that nothing is as intuitive there with this video setup as it is in Windows...