Wierd X crash

[Mel Flynn]

On Wednesday 05 August 2009 10:17:19 Coert Waagmeester wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 06:36 -0800, Mel Flynn wrote:
> > On Wednesday 05 August 2009 04:37:38 Coert Waagmeester wrote:
> > > I am fairly new to FreeBSD. I use linux a lot.
> > >
> > > Am running FreeBSD 7.2 i386 with the nvidia 173 driver with an AGP
> > > GeForce FX 5200.
> > >
> > >
> > > My X works, with xinerama and two screens, perfectly,
> > > but as soon as I hold down any key (like Backspace to remove a line of
> > > text) X crashes.
> >
> > Any key? Even one that does not create scrolling on the screen? like
> > backspace in an empty file?
> > Unless someone else has seen this, sounds really hard to debug without a
> > coredump :/
> > The only long shot I got to offer is that nvidia provides TwinView which
> > does the same as Xinerama and you might want to try that out instead.
> > There's detailed information about it in one of the Nvidia README's.
>
> Twinview did indeed completely solve the problem!
>
> What are the (dis)advantages of TwinView and Xinerama?

TwinView is preferred on nvidia cards. I don't know the exact history, but I 
think XFree and nvidia were working on multi-monitor/vidcard support around 
the same time and nvidia came up with TwinView, while XFree provided Xinerama.

Apparently, nvidia didn't like the Xinerama API and stuck with it's own, while 
incorporating some compatibility functions to make things work better, but I 
always found TwinView to work as advertized and Xinerama being buggy. Of 
course, my experience is no measurement for past and future results ;)
-- 
Mel