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I just installed Fedora 4 on my HP pavilion. It has dell monitor on an ATI Rage XL card.That is the primary monitor. The other monitor is a 15 inch hp MX50 running on the motherboard standard connection. In Windows XP I am able to use them a a dual monitor setup. My work is clerical and I use the double workspace to display the documents I work on. I would like to do the same thing on fedora if possible. As is stands at the moment. Fedora does not see the standard 15 inch monitor. I checked the drop down menu and the MX50 is not a choice listed. I was thinking of getting the online manual for the monitor and get the specs. The question, I have is this. I have no idea where to enter these specs when I get them. I was wondering if there was any sort of tutorial out there that would take me through the set up process for dual monitors. Something else I notice while I am typing this is that the performance even in Gnome is pretty sluggish. In performance I mean that surfing between various sites is sluggish. Not anywhere as crisp as XP. I was wondering if could be a videocard issue. On the install Fedora chose the driver ATI Mach 64. I checked the ATI site and there were no drivers for this old ATI Rage XL card. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
or you can go to the ati website and get download the ati drivers, type init 3 in a ctrl-alt-f(1-6) terminal, sh ati-installer.sh, run fglrxconfig, type init 5 to get back into X, and there you have it (see installation instructions for more detail)
The easy way is to install the drivers through the livna repo using yum.
If you do that then all you have to do is backup your xorg.conf file and try running
* fglrxconfig in the terminal
* system-conifg-display as root
* The ati gui that should be under the kde or gnome menus.
If this does not work then edit your original xorg.conf file manually. Google search for Xinerama and ATI or search Linuxquestions for "working ati dual head" and look at the xorg.conf files listed there and use them as examples.
The changes to xorg.conf are generally as follows.
and in the driver section make sure you are using the ati drives.
Driver "fglrx"
Then it is a matter of adding a second Monitor, Screen, and (maybe not sure) Device section following the examples of the xorg.conf files from a google or LinuxQuestions search. They will look similar to the original Monitor, Screen, and Device section only differing in the Monitor, Screen number and resolution.
BTW, if Fedora does not see the specific monitor you can just use the Generic Monitor options.
Last edited by accessrichard; 02-18-2006 at 11:03 AM.
Thanks for the information,I really appreciate it. I am pretty new on the learning curve, so I am a little unclear on a couple of things. First off, how do I add the repository livna repo? Is that an actual website? Secondly, on that yum install command, the last part (uname-r). Is that the way the command is supposed to be entered or is something else supposed to be substituted for the (uname-r). I hope these questions don't sound too stupid. Basically, I have been through some of the basic commands, like mkdir, moving files etc. I have updated yum,also installed the gui program for yum. However I have not as yet added a repository.
In windows, if you want to download a program you might go to download.com. Some programs are demo's some you have to pay for and some are free. In Linux, most all programs are free(Crossover Office is the only program I know of that is not). So Fedora, and a frew third parties make something called a repo, which is a collection of programs that you can install for Fedora. The Livna repo is such a place where you can install many multimedia, gaming, etc needs that Fedora does not provide in their repo's due to Multimedia liscencing issues or they feel are not necassary to spend time maintaining.
To install the Livna repo for FC4 create a file called livna.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d like mine.
Code:
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
[root@localhost yum.repos.d]# cat livna.repo
[livna]
name=Livna for Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
baseurl=http://livna.cat.pdx.edu/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.lvn
#baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.lvn
#baseurl=http://wftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/livna/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.lvn
#baseurl=http://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/RPMS.lvn
#mirrorlist=http://rpm.livna.org/mirrorlist
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://rpm.livna.org/RPM-LIVNA-GPG-KEY
Then run the command, or get this command from fedorafaq.org or livna if you don't trust me(this is the gpg signature that verifies that you are going to download packages from livna and not some hacker)
and then type uname -r in the terminal. It will output the kernel version that you are using. $(uname -r) and `uname -r` are just basically ways to append the output of a command to a string so what you are actually doing is typing "yum install kernel-module-fglrx-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4". It is important to install the drivers with the same kernel version or else it wont work. Likewise when you do a yum update, and your kernel gets updated, you will have to re-install all of the packages that are dependand on your kernel. The big three are the ntfs driver, ndiswrapper driver, and ati/nvidia drivers.
I would give fedorafaq.org a quick read through, and then check out http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/
and give the network book a shot.
Any more questions feel free to ask. We were all once new to linux.
Last edited by accessrichard; 02-18-2006 at 02:01 PM.
This is great information! I will definitely follow up on the online book link. So if I am understanding you correctly I change to the /etc/yum directory. Then I open some sort of text editor and code in the information you gave me about creating the repository. Is that a correct assumption on my part? I plan on copying the information just as you have presented it. I was just unsure if this involved the use of a text editor since I have not used one of those yet, or am I just supposed to type the information directly into the terminal. I was thinking of using VIM because there is a tutorial on how to use it. Thanks again for the input. You really helped out a lot.
Yes, your assumptions are correct, copy my text into a file name livna.repo in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory.
Emacs and Vi have steep learning curves. I primarily use Emacs because I have trouble getting used to the modes in Vi. There were big wars back in the day as to which one was better.
Since you are starting out at linux, maybe it would be easier to just use one without a learning curve and then experiment with those text editors and see which one you like. Once you have learned emacs or vi you will not regret it as they make editing soooo much faster.
nano is a text editor with little to no learning curve.
cd /etc/yum.repos.d
nano livna.repo
Last edited by accessrichard; 02-18-2006 at 06:47 PM.
Just wanted to thank you again for all your help. I found that the livna repository was already configured and that I did not have to add the information. I tried out the nano editor, I liked it. When I got the ATI drivers in I was able to find my card. However when I went through the GUI to activate it I got the msg. "Driver does not provide Fire GL X11 extensions. I don't know what that means but everything seems to be more responsive. Still don't have the dual monitor set up working yet. However, as per your recommendation I will do a further search. I am going to try and get the specs for the HP monitor and enter them and see what happens. I went into the X11 directory and opened up the config file. Xinerama was on and the ATI drivers were indicated as being there. I guess that about sums it up for now. Thanks again for all your help.
Well I am back again. After many trys and failures, I still have not gotten the dual monitor setup to work yet. However on the plus side I have finally learned how to copy and paste my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file into the post. I am going to post it up and I would really appreciate it if some of you would take a look at it and let me know what you think is missing. At this point pavilion monitor continues to stay in stand by mode and never powers up when I log into Fedora. I am using the generic monitor configuration because the mx50 is not listed in the hp drop down menu. Any ideas as always are greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Frank
# Xorg configuration created by system-config-display
# RgbPath is the location of the RGB database. Note, this is the name of the
# file minus the extension (like ".txt" or ".db"). There is normally
# no need to change the default.
# Multiple FontPath entries are allowed (they are concatenated together)
# By default, Red Hat 6.0 and later now use a font server independent of
# the X server to render fonts.
RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
FontPath "unix/:7100"
EndSection
# Specify which keyboard LEDs can be user-controlled (eg, with xset(1))
# Option "Xleds" "1 2 3"
# To disable the XKEYBOARD extension, uncomment XkbDisable.
# Option "XkbDisable"
# To customise the XKB settings to suit your keyboard, modify the
# lines below (which are the defaults). For example, for a non-U.S.
# keyboard, you will probably want to use:
# Option "XkbModel" "pc102"
# If you have a US Microsoft Natural keyboard, you can use:
# Option "XkbModel" "microsoft"
#
# Then to change the language, change the Layout setting.
# For example, a german layout can be obtained with:
# Option "XkbLayout" "de"
# or:
# Option "XkbLayout" "de"
# Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
#
# If you'd like to switch the positions of your capslock and
# control keys, use:
# Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:swapcaps"
# Or if you just want both to be control, use:
# Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps"
#
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
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