[CentOS] nvidia dual monitor setup centos howto

Tue Jun 16 00:23:21 UTC 2009
Dave <dave at mailinator.com>

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.rf.x86_64.rpm
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