Computer Graphics, Linux and Everything…

How to setup dual monitor in Mandriva 2009.1 with nVidia

by flord on May.05, 2009, under Mandriva

I just installed Mandriva 2009.1 and one of the first things I did was to setup my dual monitor the same way I did for the past several versions of Mandriva. But this time, it didn’t work. I mean, it worked, but it didn’t save the xorg.conf and I had to redo the config everytime I logged in. After a bit of work, I found what had changed. Here the new procedure from the begining.

  1. In the Mandriva Control Center (drakconf), go to Hardware -> Set Up The Graphical Server.
  2. Click Options, check “Enable duplicate display on the second display”. Click OK.
  3. Log out, and back in.
  4. Open a terminal as root.
  5. Type /usr/bin/nvidia-settings
  6. Go to “X Server Display Configuration”
  7. Select one of the monitors and set its position to “Right of” or “Left of”.
  8. Click Apply. You should see something different on both screens.
  9. Click “Save to X configuration file”.

Before that, I changed the permissions on the xorg.conf file to be able to write to it as a user. This is what doesn’t work anymore. Something brings back the permissions of that file to root only. So you need to run the nvidia-settings as root. Mandriva should simply ask for your root password when opening this tool, perhaps in the next version.

2 comments for this entry:
  1. DaveA

    Cheers mate. Worked brilliantly. I was chasing my tail for the last hour trying to get the config to stick in the xorg.conf.

  2. capricornus

    Thank you very much. It all seems simple, but it’s only so after doing what you gave away in this blog.

Leave a Reply

Looking for something?

Use the form below to search the site:

Still not finding what you're looking for? Drop a comment on a post or contact us so we can take care of it!

Related Links

Related blogs I follow, or sites I like.