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Sorry, I could not keep this question from turning into a wall of text so I broke it up into these 4 sections.

Hardware

I have 2 monitors (DELL E228WFP and a DELL 2007FP) hooked up to a EVGA E-GEFORCE 8800GT 600MHZ 512MB 1.8GHZ DDR3 PCI-E Dual DVI-I video card.

Goal

I would like to have the DELL 2007FP set up to the left of the DELL E228WFP and rotated into "portrait" mode^ with both screens sharing a common bottom edge.

^ This is ideal for reading PDF documentation or papers on one screen and then working on the second one.

Steps Undertaken

  1. I installed the NVidia drivers (via sudo apt-get install nvidia-current)
  2. rebooted
  3. ran nvidia-xconfig
  4. then ran nvidia-settings. However, like many people, I could not get nvidia-settings to write to my config file despite having run it with kdesudo. Instead, I opened the file with Kate (using KDESudo) and then used the preview from nvidia-settings and just copy pasted it into the file and saved it like that.

Problem

Now, if I use TwinView I have both monitors working, but when I try to use krandrtray to rotate one of them, it is shown as one large monitor so I cannot rotate just the one I want rotated. However, if I set them up as separate X windows the second one is black and krandrtray only shows the main monitor. I am at a loss of what to try next.

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Don't apologise for asking a well-crafted question, I can't help you with an answer but +1 for the clarity... =) – David Thomas Aug 30 '10 at 21:13

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

I have a similar set up, with a Dell 3008WFP and next to that a Dell 2001FP in portrait mode.

The answer is that you can only do this with Xinerama, as the nVidia driver cannot rotate screens independently when in TwinView mode. You must set up your monitors in 'separate screen' mode (this is detailed in the nVidia README) and then use Xinerama to combine the separate screens into one X11 display.

I have done this successfully to run four monitors from two video cards, with one rotated into portrait mode and all being the one X11 display (so I can drag windows between all four screens.)

However I did all this in xorg.conf, so I don't know if it's possible to do it through a GUI.

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The answer is that you can only do this with Xinerama, as the nVidia driver cannot rotate screens independently when in TwinView mode. Does this mean you do not get 3D acceleration? Or is this combining Xinerama with the nVidia drivers? – ArtB Jun 13 '11 at 15:06
Technically you're not combining Xinerama with the nVidia drivers (Xinerama is just another layer between the X server and the window manager) but it's true that older nVidia drivers did not support 3D acceleration when Xinerama was active. I believe this has been fixed now, and certainly with my three-year-old video cards I can get 3D acceleration on all four screens. – Malvineous Jun 21 '11 at 5:45

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