I have an nvidia gforce 8600GT card and getting dual monitors to work is proving to be a royal pain in the ass.

I had to download this driver add on, so I did. It added the nvidia control panel so I went to try and setup dual monitors but did not have permission, so I told it to just show the file then I copy and pasted the text into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file as root.

I rebooted like it said, but when it came back it gave me a bunch of errors and I had the option to restore, so I did. When back into the GUI I restored a backup of the file before I did the changes and rebooted again.

Now when I go in the nvidia control panel it's telling me the drivers arn't installed properly and that I need to edit the file?! Edit, to what? They really need to be more clear, we can't just guess.

Should I just format, or is there a way to fix this? I'm not really new to Linux itself, just new to using it as desktop. (I run multiple Linux servers and it's way easier then this)

Use System--> Administration--> Hardware Drivers to check your nividia driver install. Once that has been done remove the nvidia program you added (i presume it was nvidia-settings) and use the one from the official repository. Open your terminal and type:

I managed to get it going, but I can't seem to just click save, it wont work. I have to copy the whole config, open a terminal window in root, then vim to the xorg.conf file, keep hitting dd until the file is clear, then paste.

Each time, followed by a reboot (there does not seem to be a way to restart X, there's no actual service for it). Very counter productive, but did get it to work.

But now it somehow broke firefox. When I go to open it, it says it's already running, but it's not, I'm guessing it uses firefox in the same way windows uses internet explorer, for desktop, so could it have to do with that?

I have no solution to the firefox thing, it's new to me. Maybe it was because you made the changes to the xorg.conf while x was still running?

For future reference this is how you restart x:

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

Oh so I should not edit xorg.conf while X is running? I have my default runlevel set to 5 so I'm technically always in gui mode. Should I switch to 3 then do the change? Or can I restart/stop X while in runlevel 5? I tried to type "init 3" but it did not do anything.

Guess the firefox thing is a whole other beast though right? X can't really affect that in any way?

It's weird as even if I reboot, it still does it. I guess I can try reinstalling/updating it. I also have 300MB of updates pending so guess I should apply those too, but I'll wait to do it overnight.

from your user account sudo nvidia-settings

this opens the nvidia control panel, change monitor resolution color depth etc hi apply and reboot. restarting X should do the trick also I guess.

The best way to tweak with X settings is to log on remotely, e.g. from your laptop just next to the computer. Unless the system hangs, or you reboot, you can just keep going.

You _may_ change xorg.conf while X is running. It is re-loaded only at X restart (/etc/init.d/gdm restart).

You may also check xrandr for dynamic X configuration. I don't know though if it allows to set up dual monitors with nvidia.

ctl alt backspace also force kills the X server without rebooting, and as hinted at or perhaps already mentioned, you need root priveleges to edit the Xorg.conf