I had some trouble setting up dual monitors on centos with an nvidia card. I managed to track stuff down, so I thought I'd make it public on the list. I have an nvidia quadro nvs 290 in a Dell, recently installed centos5. Same stuff should apply for other nvidia cards.

I needed nvidia-x11-drv.x86_64. It is available from rpmforge. Installing rpmforge is described on this page(http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge).

If you just open the display panel and choose dual monitor settings and restart X, X can't get started and gives error messages. When I restore the old /etc/X112/xorg.conf, it comes back to life, without dual monitors of course.

Here are the actual commands I entered as root: yum install yum-priorities echo 'priority=1' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo echo 'priority=1' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Media.repo echo 'priority=2' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo echo 'priority=2' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/epel-testing.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/adobe-linux-i386.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-free-updates.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-free-updates-testing.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-nonfree-updates.repo wget http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/RPMS.dag/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.... rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm yum --localinstall rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm yum localinstall rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm yum check-update yum search nvidia yum install nvidia-x11-drv.x86_64

I originally googled around for a howto, it took me much more effort than it should to find http://wiki.centos.org. Wonder if there is a way to get google to give better results?

Found someone with similar problems, someone suggested installing the right thing but neglected to point out where it comes from. So I was getting this:

sudo yum search *nvidia* Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, security Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile * rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * epel: mirror.its.uidaho.edu * rpmfusion-free-updates-testing: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * rpmfusion-nonfree-updates: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * extras: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * rpmfusion-free-updates: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * updates: repos.lax-noc.com * base: mirrors.xmission.com * addons: repos.lax-noc.com Warning: No matches found for: *nvidia* No Matches found

Which versions of RH or FC correspond reasonably well to my version of centos? uname -a Linux 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5 #1 SMP Thu May 7 10:35:59 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

thanks, Dave