triple monitor hardware setup on FBSD - suggestions needed...

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 25 December 2004 at 17:45:49 -0800, Joe Schmoe wrote:
>
> I am currently running a triple-monitor setup under
> winXP, with an extended desktop that stretches across
> all three monitors.  I like it.
>
> I would, however, like to use FreeBSD.
>
> So, first off, what hardware (video card) comes to
> mind for doing triple screens with FreeBSD ?  A matrox
> P750 comes to mind, but when you run it with three
> screens, they downgrade to 1280x1024, which is bad.  I
> am happy to consider multiple video cards to
> accomplish this ... at the very least I need 1600x1200
> out of each card, preferably 1920x1200 ...

You're not limited to a single video card under FreeBSD.

> Second, what is the support for something like this in XFree86, or
> x.org ?

Good.

> What I am really looking for is the ability to create virtually
> sized screens - so instead of having three total (physical) screens
> that I can maximize windows inside of, I want to split each physical
> screen in half for a total of 6 virtual screens - so there are six
> total areas within which I can maximize a window in ... this is
> something I am really trying to accomplish.

I don't know how you'd do that (nor why you would want to).  X offers
a feature called Xinerama which does the opposite: it treats all
screens as part of one big screen.  The disadvantage here is that all
the screens should have the same resolution.  From experience, you
can't do everything with 2048x1536 screens: too much software
(especially from the Microsoft space, or free software which tries to
emulate it) can't handle this kind of resolution.  For example, web
browsing on such screens is a pain: either the fonts are miniscule, or
half the (broken) web sites that you browse completely break their
formatting.

I'm currently running a setup with 8 displays spread over 5 machines.
One of them has three displays.  Take a look at
http://www.lemis.com/grog/hardware.html, which is a little out of date
(I'm now running x.org, and I now have more screens), but it gives an
idea of the kind of things you can do.

Greg
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