I’m currently running Ubuntu Natty as my primary OS at work.
My setup is a Precision T3500 workstation that came with two NVIDIA Quadro cards which were a nightmare for Linux support. I heard that ATI cards supported 3 monitors on one card, as long as one of them was DisplayPort. I saw a cheap Radeon HD 5450 on sale for about $40, so I picked it up only to notice that it had an HDMI port instead of DisplayPort. I figured I’d try it anyway and was surprised to find that with the open-source radeon driver, 3 monitors work! One is connected by VGA, one HDMI and one DVI.
I had, however been experiencing random X crashes, and I suspect the problem was with the radeon driver.
Currently testing out some updated xorg drivers found at:
http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?50038-Updated-and-Optimized-Ubuntu-Free-Graphics-Drivers
My system specs:
$ sudo lshw -short
H/W path Device Class Description
====================================================
system Precision WorkStation T3500 ()
/0 bus 09KPNV
/0/0 memory 64KiB BIOS
/0/400 processor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU W3530 @ 2.80GHz
/0/400/700 memory 256KiB L1 cache
/0/400/701 memory 1MiB L2 cache
/0/400/704 memory 8MiB L3 cache
/0/1000 memory 14GiB System Memory
/0/1000/0 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/1 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/2 memory 2GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/3 memory 4GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/4 memory 4GiB DIMM DDR3 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
/0/1000/5 memory DIMM DDR3 Synchronous [empty]
/0/100 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub to ESI Port
/0/100/1 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 1
/0/100/1/0 eth0 network 82574L Gigabit Network Connection
/0/100/3 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 3
/0/100/3/0 display Cedar PRO [Radeon HD 5450]
/0/100/3/0.1 multimedia Manhattan HDMI Audio [Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series]
/0/100/7 bridge 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub PCI Express Root Port 7
/0/100/14 generic 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub System Management Registers
/0/100/14.1 generic 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub GPIO and Scratch Pad Registers
/0/100/14.2 generic 5520/5500/X58 I/O Hub Control Status and RAS Registers
/0/100/1a bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4
/0/100/1a.1 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5
/0/100/1a.2 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6
/0/100/1a.7 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1b multimedia 82801JI (ICH10 Family) HD Audio Controller
/0/100/1c bridge 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 1
/0/100/1c.5 bridge 82801JI (ICH10 Family) PCI Express Root Port 6
/0/100/1c.5/0 eth1 network NetXtreme BCM5761 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe
/0/100/1d bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1d.1 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2
/0/100/1d.2 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3
/0/100/1d.7 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1
/0/100/1e bridge 82801 PCI Bridge
/0/100/1f bridge 82801JIR (ICH10R) LPC Interface Controller
/0/100/1f.2 scsi0 storage 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SATA AHCI Controller
/0/100/1f.2/0 /dev/sda disk 250GB ST3250318AS
/0/100/1f.2/0/1 /dev/sda1 volume 101MiB Linux filesystem partition
/0/100/1f.2/0/2 /dev/sda2 volume 4102MiB Linux swap volume
/0/100/1f.2/0/3 /dev/sda3 volume 20GiB EXT4 volume
/0/100/1f.2/0/4 /dev/sda4 volume 208GiB EXT4 volume
/0/100/1f.2/1 /dev/sdb disk 1500GB WDC WD15EARS-00M
/0/100/1f.2/1/1 /dev/sdb1 volume 499GiB Data partition
/0/100/1f.2/1/2 /dev/sdb2 volume 897GiB Data partition
/0/100/1f.2/2 /dev/cdrom disk DVD-ROM TS-H353C
/0/100/1f.2/3 /dev/cdrw disk DVD+-RW TS-H653F
/0/100/1f.2/3/0 /dev/cdrw disk
/0/100/1f.3 bus 82801JI (ICH10 Family) SMBus Controller