3 monitors and Updated xorg mesa drivers for Ubuntu Natty
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
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:6.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/6.0.2
Any chance you could publish your xorg.conf file? I can’t seem to get all three to work at once (on the same card / setup). Thanks.
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1
I actually don’t have an xorg.conf on that machine…