Does Gnome have good dual monitor support

[VinylxScratches]

I am planning on building a PC with dual screen in mind 2x22inch. Is it easy to do? I am open to the operating systems but I would like to stick to Debian or OpenSuse.

I'm not having good luck on a W500. I'd like to have the main OS window with the bar and then a extended monitor where I can slap applications in.

 

[Khyron320]

Think it more depends on your video card vendor. ATI abandon its older Gen cards and support is poor.

 

[Vadatajs]

Gnome does just fine, but like Khyron said, the video card drivers have more to do with a good experience than the desktop environment (since any DE worth its salt will support xinerama).

Nvidia is painless. Very easy to set up.

 

[Nothinman]

The WM matters as well, I was very annoyed with the way E17 handled dual monitors. Enough to go back to E16 at work. It's really going to depend on how you're used to using them.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Yeah assuming you're running nvidia, just run xnvidiaconfig...or whatever it is and set it up there. Opensuse 11.3 will default to the new OSS nvidia drivers (nuveaou...or something like that). I'm not sure what the best video settings config method is in that case.

Seems like the newest xorg setups are moving away from the old xorg.conf way of doing things.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Yeah.....I'll vouch for nVidia. I lucked out a few years ago when deploying SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on my laptop....the company had bumped up the video card so I could do the 3D cube thing. 😀 Anyhow, I was able to extend my screen to a second flat-screen monitor and it was pretty much flawless.

 

[Rifter]

with a nvidia card its no problem, i gave up on ATI for linux its not even close to worth the hassle.

 

[t-ray]

I'm glad some one posted this. I hope do be doing this as well in the next couple of months.

One thing that I am curious about is the behavior of the gnome panels. Do the panels extend to both monitors, or are they restricted to the primary display?

I've got a slick little app running on xp called UltraMon. It extends the windows taskbar across the entire deskspace. The benefit of this feature is that if an app is running on the secondary monitor, it shows up on the taskbar on that monitor, stead of the main taskbar.

It also supports custom hotkeys for various actions. For example, I have bound the CTRL+* key combination to switch the desktop of the application in focus. So I can have a console running and press CTRL+* to switch it to the other monitor.

I've been using this app for a few years now. I like it enough that I've paid for its license twice.

Is there any kind of functional analog for gnome?

 

[KeypoX]

NV actually doesnt have true dual monitor support, it just expands across 2 monitors. Apps like xbmc, boxee cannot be fullscreened on one monitor. Its just a mess, but works fine for having multiple windows open, but other things not so well.