Is there anyway to get a dual head system to use the two monitors as two different consoles? I got a dual head setup working nicely in F25 and Gnome, but when I switch to the console the two monitors are mirrored. Can they be set up to be two different consoles as well as the virtual consoles on "Alt-F2, Alt-F3" etc?
On Sat, 11 Mar 2017 12:30:22 -0600 Steve Berg sberg@mississippi.com wrote:
Is there anyway to get a dual head system to use the two monitors as two different consoles? I got a dual head setup working nicely in F25 and Gnome, but when I switch to the console the two monitors are mirrored. Can they be set up to be two different consoles as well as the virtual consoles on "Alt-F2, Alt-F3" etc?
I don't know, but I suspect that the framebuffer software that runs the virtual consoles is not sophisticated enough to do what you want.
On 11.03.2017 23:36, stan wrote:
On Sat, 11 Mar 2017 12:30:22 -0600 Steve Berg sberg@mississippi.com wrote:
Is there anyway to get a dual head system to use the two monitors as two different consoles? I got a dual head setup working nicely in F25 and Gnome, but when I switch to the console the two monitors are mirrored. Can they be set up to be two different consoles as well as the virtual consoles on "Alt-F2, Alt-F3" etc?
I don't know, but I suspect that the framebuffer software that runs the virtual consoles is not sophisticated enough to do what you want.
That "sophisticated" software "that runs the virtual consoles" with multiple outputs is called X Window System, be it X11 or Wayland. So if you ask the Linux kernel console to be the X Window System, well, it is, already! Do you follow? :)
On Mon, 13 Mar 2017, poma wrote:
On 11.03.2017 23:36, stan wrote:
On Sat, 11 Mar 2017 12:30:22 -0600 Steve Berg sberg@mississippi.com wrote:
Is there anyway to get a dual head system to use the two monitors as two different consoles? I got a dual head setup working nicely in F25 and Gnome, but when I switch to the console the two monitors are mirrored. Can they be set up to be two different consoles as well as the virtual consoles on "Alt-F2, Alt-F3" etc?
I don't know, but I suspect that the framebuffer software that runs the virtual consoles is not sophisticated enough to do what you want.
That "sophisticated" software "that runs the virtual consoles" with multiple outputs is called X Window System, be it X11 or Wayland. So if you ask the Linux kernel console to be the X Window System, well, it is, already! Do you follow? :)
I don't. My recollection is that with a single keyboard and monitor, virtual consoles do not require X. One can even run different instances of X on each virtual console.
On Mon, 13 Mar 2017 13:53:55 +0100 poma pomidorabelisima@gmail.com wrote:
That "sophisticated" software "that runs the virtual consoles" with multiple outputs is called X Window System, be it X11 or Wayland. So if you ask the Linux kernel console to be the X Window System, well, it is, already! Do you follow? :)
I think you are thinking of xterms, that run under X. But the virtual consoles are started by agetty at startup, and when I look in man agetty, I don't see any way to tell agetty which hardware to use. Systemd might be able to somehow do that when it starts the consoles. Maybe some can be set to permanently use a different video output device. I didn't look into it deeply enough to find how the output device is set.
I see that only in kernel 4.11 has the framebuffer code been enhanced to allow for separate buffers for each virtual console, and I think that would be essential for using separate screens, though I haven't got it working. Because they share a scrollback buffer, if I log into two virtual consoles and do output in both, I lose the ability to scroll backward in a virtual console if I switch to another virtual console and back because of this. Using screen in a virtual console already has this capability, but that is because screen provides it.