need help with ATI radeon 9600 dual-head xorg.conf [SOLVED]

[nberliner]

Hello,

I am trying to set up a dual-head (no xinerama) configuration for my ATI radeon 9600 card. Unfortunately the only thing I get is a clone mode where both monitors have the same resolution and show the exact same content. The two monitors have a different size so I need them to have different resolutions and I am not interested in moving windows from one to the other. I even don't need different X sessions running all I need is to decide where a new window should be shown.


So here are some weird observations I made.

I can move my mouse over the right border of my screen and it seems that there is a 'virtual' monitor because the mouse appears not immediately back at my screen when I move the cursor back (to be precise it needs the same time at the same speed to come back).

I can start xclock

[El Tazar]

I have a dual-head setup on my IBM T42 (Radeon 9600 mobile) that had individual contents and different resolutions. It might use some laptop-specific features. Hope you can use some of it.

[nberliner]

Hi thank you for your xorg.conf file. Unfortunately nothing changed although I nearly copied it.
It has never bothered me before but just to be sure I got AGP and DRI running but this has changed nothing, too.

I found a very very old ATI Proprietary Linux Release Note (driver version 3.12.0) http://www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/linux_3.12.0.html in which I read this

[El Tazar]

It's been a while since I configured it, but I think that switching between these resulted in what you need:

[nberliner]

I have already tried the MonitorLayout option but it is depreciated. This is what is written in the log file

[nberliner]

Hi,

here a short report of my results I made so far. May be someone is interested.

I finally got my dual-head config working. As I expected I had a kind of working xorg.conf. The resolution was to check the enabled displays with the aticonfig tool. What it said was

[nberliner]

Here my final report. Everything is working now as it should.

First a correction of my statement about the primary output. Of course the option "SwapScreens" changes the primary with secondary head as it says. So the digital output is primary and you can change it with this option if necessary.


I am not sure what fixed my problem with the video playback. But now I am able to play movies on both monitors.
I have read somewhere that you only can enable one overlay option. Either VideoOverlay or OpenGLOverlay and that you should set the option PseudoColorVisuals off. May that was it that helped may be not.

Another problem occurred was that my secondary monitor which is bigger than my primary showed up the correct resolution but only the screen size of my primary monitor was used by the KDE panel and for fullscreen mode. Like described in this Bug report http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=240 with the difference that my hole screen was usable.
I fixed it by setting the virtual screen size of the secondary monitor to the correct size and by disabling the xinerama USE flag (which I enabled to see if it works with one big screen; it didn't) to allow the applications to spread into the "invisible" area of the screen.

Well, it took me some time to get it working. I hope these posts are helpful.

[tetonedge]

could your post your xorg.conf for others, thanks

[nberliner]

The problem with the incorrect full screen size of the secondary monitor was due to a bug in xorg-server 1.3 (view the post of soka from whom I have the information https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-592736-highlight-xorg+conf.html).

And here my final xorg.conf