Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[MU]

The proprietary drivers from Ati and Nvidia have grafical utilities to set up options.

Nvidia Settings and Ati Catalyst Control Center.

But once you change settings, they are not remembered after restarting X.
The reason is Puppys hardwaredetection.
It erases all changes made by those utilities.

Solution 1:
Install the attached pet, it wil perform solution 2 automatically, when you run the tools from the menu.

It replaces the menu entries for these tools with new ones, that start them using a script. This script performs the steps of "Solution 2".

Solution 2:
Once you made your changes, copy xorg.conf over the "second" xorg.conf.
It has such a name:
xorg.conf.HARDWAREPROFILE.

The word HARDWAREPROFILE is different on every system.
On mine it is called xorg.conf.ATI_ATOMBIOSV223W or xorg.conf.ATI_ATOMBIOSBenQFP202WA, depending if my second monitor is attached or not.

Note:
If you run other utilities like "aticonfig --initial=dual-head", then you must also perform this step!
My "solution 1" above just covers the 2 grafical utilities, but no others.

And a note concerning 2 monitors with Ati:
After changing the configuration in the Catalyst Control Center, you must reboot.
If you get a black screen then, reboot again.
It often just works for me after a second reboot.
I also was not able first to set the screen resolution of the second Monitor.
The solution was, to activate "xinerama", then reboot.
Then it suddenly worked.

Also note, that different windowmanagers may behave very different.
Xfce handles 2 screens different than Openbox.
For Xinerama, Xfce is fine for me.
To use one screen independent, Openbox is better for me.

My pet also includes a comandline-tool "moni2".
If you have no xinerama, you can use it to run a program on the second screen.

Example:
moni2 mplayer -fs -x 1680 -y 1050 /root/test.avi

moni2 is a very simple script:

[MU]

Here is another utility.
I am not certain, if I posted it before, at least I cannot find it.

It is a xmessage dialog to select one or two monitors.

It will copy pre-defined versions of xorg.conf to /etc/X11, and restart X.

When X restarts with two monitors, then a script in /root/Startup is executed.
It activates the one-screen xorg.conf again, so at next reboot, only one screen is used.
This is required, if your driver crashes, with setting for 2 monitors at startup.
I am not certain, that this still is required with the latest drivers 9.8/9.9.
But if you use 9.3, you need that.

Look here for Pet and screenshot of "ATI-2monitors":
http://dotpups.de/puppy4/dotpups/XServer/

Mark