[CentOS] dual head on centos 5 and ancient Nvidia Quadro NVS280SD card

[Ross Walker]

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 2:34 PM, Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 6, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Fred Smith <fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us>wrote:
>
>> I was just handed a 2nd monitor for my system at work, and using Centos 5
>> (latest)
>> can't make dual head work. a good bit of googling isn't being particularly
>> helpful either.
>>
>
> Dual head or dual monitor?
>
> Dual head typically means running two instances of X, one on each video
> out, which can only be done with two or more graphic cards from what I can
> gather.
>
>
>
>> It's a HP workstation xw4100, with Nvidia Quadro NVS280SD graphics card.
>> Enabling dual head in the "display" app simply configures X so that it
>> (i.e., X) won't start. I haven't found the x log file in /var/log to be
>> helpful, either. This is using the legacy 96.x.x driver from Nvidia.
>>
>> the NvidiaDetect app (from epel) says it should be using a newer driver
>> than the 96.x.x (forgot which one, exactly) but when attempting to install
>> it I get a msg that the card requires a 96.x.x driver.
>>
>> browsing to nvidia.com and entering the model numbers into their driver
>> finder app gives another newer version that also gives the same result.
>> So it looks like I'm stuck with the 96.x.x driver.
>>
>> some googling indicates a few people have made it work, but none of their
>> methods are working for me.
>>
>> I was beginning to wonder if the hardware even supported dual head, so I
>> booted up a Fedora 17 LIVE CD. it initializes both monitors with no action
>> from me at all, with a desktop spanning the two screens, just fine. It
>> must
>> be using the Nouveau driver (which, AFAIK, can't be used on Centos 5),
>> so still the issue could either be spanning/dual head doesn't work with
>> the
>> ancient nvidia driver, or we (neither me, nor the tools on Centos) knows
>> how to configure it.
>>
>> Clues would be appreciated. thanks in advance!
>>
>
> In my experience I was able to drive both the DisplayPort and DVI (or HDMI
> and VGA) interfaces off my card to give me dual monitor support.
>
> To setup the monitor preference I just created a monitors.conf file in
> /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d as such:
>
> Section "Monitor"
>         Identifier      "HDMI1"
>         Option          "Primary"       "true"
> EndSection
>
> Section "Monitor"
>         Identifier      "VGA1"
>         Option          "RightOf"       "HDMI1"
> EndSection
>
> Substitute the Identifier for whatever 'xrandr' gives you, and use LeftOf
> if you secondary monitor is left of your primary.
>

Nevermind, I am not paying attention here, my setup is C6 with Intel.

-Ross