Sunday, March 25, 2007

Beryl: Lack of Dual Video Card Support

I recently upgraded from one EVGA Gefore 6800 PCI Express card which had two 19" Widescreen Samsung Syncmaster monitors to two Gigabyte Geforce 7300 LE video cards. Since they were both nvidia cards, the upgrade was quite easy. I was required to make a few updates in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf. These weren't to bad. It required adding another video card section, or 'device' and then linking that device to one of the other monitors and adding it to the server layout.

The really disappointing thing was the lack of beryl support for multiple video cards. At first I thought that some configuration item was messed up, so I started troubleshooting. I closed beryl manager and opened beryl through the command prompt and I was able to see the error regarding ROR which would not allow beryl to start.

I started looking through the forums on the beryl website and I did find a few places that explained why this was not possible, although there were a few posts that eluded to the possibility of two video cards and beryl. In order to clear up confusion, I created a post to try to get a straight answer. After a few days, I received no response, so I posted again.....still no response. Here is the link to the forum post. Maybe someone will reply, but until then it seems impossible to use beryl with two video cards and one extended desktop. (Note: Beryl does work with two video cards if you use two separate X sessions. You can still drag the mouse between them screen, but you cannot drag windows between the sessions or interact in any other way.)

No comments: