Ok, i have recently hooked up two video cards to my computer: Radeon 9600 256MB AGP and a Rage 128 Pro PCI. How would i get around to configuring it so that they both work seperately? When i boot up i only get output from my PCI card. I have a similar problem with my windows partition, but there i only get output from AGP. Anyone got any tips on where to start looking and what to start doing? Thanks.

Basically, it won't work in the console. If you're lucky, it'll work in X.
When I tried multiple video cards I always got in trouble when the BIOS tried to initialise the second card. A result of 20-year backward compatibility in the IBM-PC...

For X you could do a "X -configure" and start from the file it generated.
Google for "xinerama" for more config info.

When you too have the bios problem like me, X will not complain or anything but one of the cards will just show garbage.

Good luck
nukkel

Is there anyway to choose which screen to show on boot-up? It'd be sorta nice if my primary monitor was working (the one i have on my desk) instead of my secondary which is in another room. Like that i could choose what to boot up using GRUB. Is there a way to hotkey grub then? To make it so it doesnt do a timed login and so that F1 loads linux, F2 loads windows and F3 loads linux in recovery mode or something like that? Cuz it's a pain in the ass if i have to remember how many times i pressed the down key before hitting enter. Well, thanks you've given me a place to start in linux. The problem is that ill have to switch monitor cables to be able to work on it. Thanks

Well in my experience I had to change a BIOS setting to choose which card to boot from (AGP/PCI) -- that was on my newer computer. On an old one with two or three PCI video cards it was always the card in the lowest PCI slot number that ended up being used as "primary"...

It's really a case of trail and error

In your case it may be possible to get X to use only the AGP output... but then you won't see the boot messages; you'll only get output the moment X starts up

About the hotkeys, I'm not that familiar with GRUB beyond the basic stuff, but it may very well be possible since it's a quite powerful bootloader... Maybe best to start another thread for that so more people will read it?

good luck with it,
nukkel

Ill try to see if my bios suppors booting up from only AGP, it'd be much more comfortable. From what i've seen, grub is pretty powerful, i might even be able to make it boot up with AGP if i edit the commands, but i dont really see this as a priority compared to getting both screens to work after boot up.

About xinerama, can you make it so that the 2nd monitor only shows desktop 4? So that my main can use 1,2,3 and 4 while the second one is always stuck on 4. My second monitor is more of a presentation monitor, and i just want it to output videos and powerpoints and stuff. I'll try to get around to getting the settings for both cards, i have the AGP settings already, but im missing the PCI card settings (have 2nd monitor settings also). Thanks alot.

Hmm not really... or maybe only with a very smart window manager. I'm not sure if one such exists...
However it is also possible to run the two displays *without* xinerama. Then both displays will not be "merged" but the primary one will be used by default while output may be sent to the secondary, by setting the DISPLAY variable before running the program.

E.g. if in an xterm one types
the clock should be displayed on the second head (depending on setup it may also be ":0.1" instead of ":1")

I really want to get around to this but i've been very busy lately, once i get it working ill post whatever i can get working. Man multiple monitor support is a hassle, but once you get it working you're god :P. I know KDE has some components that do multiple monitor things, but you have to configure them first. Ill look into that probably in 2 weeks, but it's all good. Thanks alot