On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 10:38:34PM -0500, Jim Cornette wrote:
The programs suck. Configuring the displays to work was pretty easy though. Did you have to manually edit your configuration files to get things setup or were you able to use some easy to run tool?
In windows, the second display presents a text message on screen that tells you where to go to configure the second monitor. You follow the text directions on the second display and you are all set to go.
I agree, configuring X via a GUI to take advantage of anything more than the most vanilla configuration is a recent development. One should understand, however, that the priority over these many years has been to make X even work on hardware that is often not well documented, etc.
I'm impressed that you can use dual-displays for a decade now. It would be better for this feature to be easier to configure and work for more cases than only for special configuration of the files or customized programs.
*XFree86* hasn't supported multiple displays that long, but *some* X server has, either on Sun equipment, or the Xi Graphics product for i386 (which I used on Linux and Solaris long ago). Multiple screen support was a fundamental design element of X -- that's why your $DISPLAY variable is :<xserver>.<screen#>. On Windows, AFAIK, one still just gets a single simulated large display.
In the past, multi-head was achieved with multiple video adapters -- [and those adapters, e.g., Matrox, had to have a special feature to turn off the VGA hw registers on all but the first card]. These days, commodity cards support dual-head, though often with various limitations (like lower RAMDAC speed on the second head), special setup requirements that are not (well-)documented by the vendors, etc. One still needs special Option lines in the device config to correctly select analog, flat-panel, TV-Out, etc. on various cards.
And auto-configuration depends on auto-detection, which involves things like DDC probing, matching to a database of hardware quirks and monitor types, determining which bit-depths can be supported on each card/screen, etc.
Remember, for the most part, X drivers have been developed by third-parties, not the hardware vendors themselves, who supply the Windows drivers that take full advantage of their product.
Bill Rugolsky