Thread: "Windows 9" "Threshold" and "Windows" Rumors thread
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Old 09-18-2014, 02:17 PM   #13
DMcCunney
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthem View Post
I always wait with bated breath when trying out multi-monitor support in Ubuntu. I put my little USB in and start praying. But, these days, it seems to work quite a bit better than it used to. In 12.04 it would randomly deactivate my second monitor, set that off monitor as the main display, and then cause hell with my built-in display on one of my laptops. Ugh! But that went away when I switched to a more recent version of Ubuntu and started using the Free drivers for the display card.
Yeah, video tends to be quirky.

The old notebook running Ubuntu has an ATI Mobility chipset, and does 1280x768 resolution in Windows. (In Windows, it will go even higher, but it does so by creating a 1280x768 window onto a larger workspace, and you pan to see it all. No thanks.)

Getting that in Ubuntu required using ndiswrapper to use the Windows driver. The free driver did 1024x768 at best, And even then, Ubuntu reverted to 1024x768 after one OS upgrade. Poking around indicated Ubuntu knew what the card could theoretically do, but I couldn't track down the config file I needed to change to get the expected performance. Things were back to normal after the next Ubuntu upgrade.

A friend reported the fun of getting dual monitor support in Ubuntu. Part of it was hardware issues on the part of one monitor. The other was getting it to work in Ubuntu. He spends most of his time cranking out code, so he has no interest in an eye candy UI. He wants emacs up on one screen, and console windows for compiler/debugger output on the other, with the odd instance of Firefox or the like. He uses a very minimalist window manager (I don't recall just which). He got it working, but it took more doing than it arguably should have.

On that line, a personal annoyance these days is that monitors all seem to be wide screen. That's nice if you are watching a video, but less suited for text. I am mystified by folks who have applications set to take the whole screen for things like reading and replying to email.
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Dennis
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