First off: if any of this is confusing or missing info PLEASE comment and I'll happily clarify and/or add more info.
I've got a brand new MSI laptop with Linux Mint (17.1) installed on it. It has an Nvidia GTX870m graphics card (and a built-in Intel one also). It seems to be using the NVidia graphics drivers, but even though I have a second monitor plugged in, the "Monitor Preferences" dialog doesn't see it (even when I click "Detect Monitors".
I've tried installing the graphics drivers manually from NVidia, and automatically from the package nvidia-current, but neither one seems to work. In fact, when I messed around with them too much I wound up killing my GUI, and nothing worked until I removed all nvidia* packages and then re-installed nvidia-current.
If I install nvidia-settings and run the NVidia settings program it works, but it only has two options on the left: Application Profiles and nvidia-settings Configuration. Having used this program in the past, I would expect it to have many more options, including some for configuring my monitor, but strangely that's all I have.
Does anyone know how I can get my computer to recognize my monitor? It can be via "Monitor Preferences", "Nvidia Settings", or any other program; I'm not picky :-)
P.S. When I first installed the drivers manually I was able to do sudo service mdm stop (from the CTRL + F1 display) so that I could install the drivers. However, when I tried to reinstall them I found that same command no longer worked; when I tried to run it it would switch me to an all black screen with a single cursor. So now I can't reinstall the manual drivers, because they require MDM to be off and I can't kill MDM without losing my command prompt.
