I got a 22" samsung monitor, and would like to plug it into my laptop, and make the two screens into a dual-screen setup (where I see different things on each screen).
At first, it wasn’t working, and all the tutorials I looked up had you editing the xorg.conf file (not my favorite thing to do). I found and completed 3 tutorials to no avail.
Then in a last-ditch attempt, I hit Fn+F8 key combo while my computer was still loading the BIOS. This worked, and now the screen is recognized and showing (almost) the correct resolution. It’s close enough for me anyways (just a few black pixels on one side). My question, is how to get this dialog to work to set up dual-monitor. It seems like it should work to set them up, but when I change the current settings (left) to the desired settings (right), it pretends to change (screens turn off and then on again, asks me if I want to keep the settings) but there’s no actual change. Help. please? Thank you!
I gave up with the wizard thing, like every version since it still doesn’t work for me and I just end up editing xorg.conf for the two 21" IIyamas VMP’s I’m still using, it’s been years now and still no proper wizard for dual screens, any distro.
Each time I upgrade a distro the first thing I do is to see if it can detect the monitors and set it up correctly but every time it fails.
The annoying thing is it just seems to ignore the NVidia proprietary drivers and keeps defaulting back to the free ‘nv’ version which can’t handle dual monitors still I think. Like anyone is going to be happy with an unaccelerated desktop these days.
Sorry not much help but your not the only one struggling.
You just got me curious to try because I also have a LCD screen connected to a laptop, both with your same native resolutions and I was never able to use a dual display, but I just figured how.
I have always prefered to just turn the laptop’s display off, but I figured I could try to use both screens now that I upgraded Ubuntu and it comes with the newest drivers. Before that, it was bloody difficult to guess how to modify xorg.conf to get my external monitor to work in its optimal frequencies and most of the times I used to get an annoying line of corrupted data which would go away only by rebooting until it was gone. After the upgrade the external LCD works correctly without any special settings and the line is gone.
But going back to the dual screen, most likely the problem has to do with the maximum virtual display. I tried this:
xrandr --output VGA --rightof LVDS
Gave an error about exceeding the maximum virtual size.
So I added add a few lines to xorg.conf, specially the “virtual” bit, as described here.
I tried again:
xrandr --output LVDS --above VGA
It works. Now I have a dual screen for the first ime ever! Acceleration works.
Note you will most likely not be able to use a left to right arrangement because 1280 + 1680 > 2048. Probably only “above” and “below” will work.
EDIT I will probably not like it if I don’t get my tablet to use one screen at a time…
I have a similiar issue with my install of ubuntu. For some reason every 1-2 minutes or so my main screen (well actually my secondary in ubuntu till i get it working right) will flash on and off like someone is disconnecting it from the signal…I get no error msg though. I’ve yet to find anything that would resolve this issue for me so I’ve gone on to only using one monitor for ubuntu
some things are heavy hardware-bios-setup dependend, for example for a lot of laptops with shared grafic-memory, the settings in bios have to be adjusted and even then there are still limits like with separate cards too.
for those using nvidia-cards, you should try the graphic-tool (search in synaptic for nvidia)
