Hello all,

I've been wanting to switch my main computer that I do all my day to day stuff on to linux, but the problem I always seem to run into is I can't get my quad screen to work.

I have two dualhead video cards an ATI Radeon and an ASUS nVidea GeForce. Furthermore one of my screens is upside down.

I've seen lots of people with dual monitors and have setup dual monitors on linux before my self.

But Dual Dual is not something I've seen talked about. Especially with two different manufacturers.

And before you ask what distro, none currently, thought I'm inclined to go with Ubuntu. Unless one of you tells me that another distro is good and is really good with multiscreen I may change my mind.

Can some one give me some advice on this please?

Thank you very much

P.S. I'm a bit rusty with linux so treat me as a n00b

While I haven't done dual dual cards, I've combined my only dual head card (AGP) with a single head cards of different manufacturers (PCI). I use Debian 4.0, which is similar enough to Ubuntu that I know it will work with Ubuntu.

I'm not familiar with user-friendly GUI tools for configuring multi-monitor displays. I'm just used to manually editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration file in a text editor. When I started playing with multi-monitor configuration, I basically just copied from examples I found on the Internet and made educated guesses at what I needed to do to make it triple-screen. Most examples were dual-head, but I wanted triple-head. I didn't need to do anything non-obvious to acheive this. Triple-head or quadruple-head or more wasn't any more difficult than dual-head; it just meant more cards/monitors to add.

I'm certain that you can get your quad screens to work just fine in Linux, but it may take extra effort to configure the upside-down screen. If the video card driver doesn't support flipping that screen natively, then you might need to use something called "xephyr" to flip it upside-down in software.

I'm not sure, but I think that dual-head with nVidia might require installing nVidia's official driver. I'm not sure about Ati. My dual-head card is an old Matrox card, and it worked with the default open source driver.

Can you post some addition information like the section of the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file that shows the cards getting detected like below:

Then the monitor names/models the refresh rates if you know them, the physical layout on your desk of the monitors, which monitor is connected to which connector on the video cards eg. connector near motherboard at the bottom of the cards or on top plus your current xorg.conf and desired resolutions of the screens. Hopefully your card works with the radeon driver as I believe you cannot install the firegl and nvidia at the same time and the nv does not support dual head but I think the radeon does.