Three monitors under CentOS 6.4?
 

I plan on configuring a new PC with CentOS 6.4 and want to have three monitors hooked up, mimicking the Windows system I am replacing. I have a 1200x1920 display on the left, and 2560x1600 display in the middle, and another 1200x1920 display on the right.

Is this going to be a problem under CentOS? The card in the system has three ports--VGA, DVI, and HDMI.

What is the video card? As long as the hardware supports it, most Xorg video drivers support multiple monitors on multiple ports on the same GPU.

I haven't seen a card with VGA, DVI, and HDMI which actually can drive three monitors simultaneously.

The card is a GeForce® GT 620. Some other guys at the office have a different brand of card with three digital ports and it's working fine for them under Ubuntu. If I can't get my VGA/HDMI/DVI card to work, I'll get the same card they have.

DisplayLink is another option I might consider.

You can add another card (PCIe x1), doesn't need to be high end for display(s) that do not need bleeding edge acceleration.

Here's a related question. At the moment I have two of my monitors up and running. When I boot the box though it doesn't remember the settings for the monitors. I have explicitly run xrandx and enter the command

xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --primary --auto --left-of HDMI-1

The DVI monitor is my primary monitor, as 2560x1600 Dell, and the HDMI monitor is my right hand monitor and oriented as a 1200x1920 portrait display. When I boot my box, I first have to go into Display settings and respecify the dimensions and orientation of the monitors, and then I have to run the xrandx command above. I assume there is a way to permanently set this configuration.

Hopefully soon I'll add the third monitor, another 1200x1920 portrait display to the left of the 2560x1600 monitor, and of course I'll want that added to the default config.

So, what's the process for doing this?

I may sound sarcastic, sorry for that, but if you want to hookup three monitors, why RHEL or CentOS? Aren't these serious server OS? I go even further – you don't even need 1 monitor. Just ssh to server.

Aren't Ubuntu, Mint are best candidates for this?

Our product is based on CentOS, and 99% of what I do each day is in CentOS. I had been using a Windows box and used ssh to get into a CentOS box to do my builds, but I found the dual environment a nuisance. Now I have a 100% CentOS environment where I run Eclipse and all of my other tools. Unfortunately CentOS isn't really suited as a desktop environment. I knew that going in, but it's even worse than I expected.

Still, while it may be a server, you'd think there'd be a way to configure it to remember how the monitors are configured. I don't really want to create an xorg.conf by hand.