Nvidia Driver / Xinerama in debian
 

I have just installed Debian, with the bare minimum setup (Command-line interface only) and installed only X and FVWM on top of that, and it is working quite well.

The problem is that only my main monitor in my dual-monitor setup is working, and the graphics performance is very poor. As for the driver, I would like to first try a free driver such as nv or nouveau, and for the dual monitors I will brobably need something like Xinerama. Could you help me figure out ho to install these?

Also, on the side, I wonder if it is possible to install a theme for GTK?

I was under the impression that you need the proprietary Nvidia driver to run dual monitors.

Yes.i've just come across this myself with Fluxbox.
Have a look at gtk-chtheme,then you can install and use the gtk2-engines you can find in the repositories.

I'm not sure whether you have to have the proprietary driver for Xinerema, we will have to see about that.

And I got the theme changer, but I don't have any themes to change to! how do I get them?

aptitude install gtk2-engines-cleanice gtk2-engines-xfce

These should get you started;)

What do they do? What's with Xfce?

They are the themes!.

Xfce themes.

The cleanice one worked, but I didn't install the xfce one because it wanted to install stuff like xfce-panel. I wonder where do I get the themes that come with GNOME/Metacity?

What i do to stop this is add the following to /etc/apt/apt.conf

So now you only install dependencies.

The propietary driver will support two operation modes: dual head and twinview. Dual head is for two separate monitors, you can't move windows between them. Twinview is the nvidia alternative to xinerama, and it compatible with it in many regards. In any case, you should be able to do most of the setup using the nvidia control panel, "nvidia-settings" if my memory serves.

nv should support dual head and xinerama, I have very little experience with this driver. Don't expect anything too great from this driver unless you can live with 2d acceleration only. I have no idea what it's current status is, let's say, compared to vesa.

nouveu is highly experimental, I don't advice you to use it unless you are experienced dealing with compiling code and rolling your own solutions, reporting bugs, etc. Of course your experience may vary, but experimental software is experimental for a reason.

gtk-chtheme should take care of this. You will also need to install some gtk-engines and some gnome themes (for example from gnome-look.org). The engines can be installed probably from your package manager. And the themes are usually just uncompressed into ~/.themes/

An alternative to gtk-chtheme is lxappearance, which also lets you change the icon theme, and the fonts.

I used the proprietary driver in Fedora, but I still liked Xinerama better than dual head (because the whole point is for 1 desktop to flow to the next monitor), or TwinView (because it lets the cursor go into the non-visible area caused by the fact that the monitors are set to different resolutions).

I don't have such a file! I can only find /etc/apt/apt.conf.d

That's because you need to create the file yourself.

vim /etc/apt/apt.conf

Then add:

Then save the file,and do an aptitude update.
You should then be good to go.

I installed xfce themes and also did gtk2-engines* and got some good ones. For now I picked Clearlooks, it was my favorite on Fedora, too.

I am pretty sure that the proprietary driver is not needed for dual monitors, they worked in Fedora without it.

Now where do I install nv and Xinerama?

If you don't have it installed already:

aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-nv

You'll then need to change /etc/X11/xorg.conf accordingly.
If your xorg.conf is empty,the second link in my sig shows you how to generate it.
As for Xinerama i can't help as i don't use it mself.

Yes, they do work with nv as well. Never said otherwise. It all depends on the kind of apps and the graphics performance that you expect from your hardware.

The basic is change the Driver line to "nv" in your xorg.conf. As for xinerama, you need also Xinerama "true" in the serverflags section. As said, that's the basic idea. Depending on your hardware and the xorg version you might need some extra luck though.

I Also advice you to take a look at the xorg.conf man page.