I am running Fedora 13 on a PC I built myself - MSI motherboard 785-E53. It has onboard DVI which my primary monitor is hooked to. I added an older 17" CRT to the onboard analog output and the main desktop with my icons and panels immediately switched to the CRT. Kernel is 2.6.34.7-66.fc13.i686, lspci -v says VGA compatible controller ATI Technologies Inc RS880 (Radeon HD 4200). How can I get flatscreen on the DVI output to be the primary?

Any help appreciated,

Gary

you would probably need to install the proprietary ATI video drivers for you card to get a dual head set-up from your system

You do not need the proprietary drivers to get a dualhead setup. Both gnome and KDE have display configuration utilities that should let you setup the monitors, and make one or the other primary. Have you tried this yet?

Adam - I was going to Preferences - Monitors; I did find a choice for displays in Control center which I didn't notice before. However, under the settings tab in display the CRT resolution etc is already listed and if I go to Dual head & check the "use dual head" box it won't let me OK out of it because it is looking for me to choose the 2nd video card which doesn't exist. VGA and DVI outputs are both from the motherboard....

I suppose the simplest solution is to add the second video card and plug the CRT into that, right?

Actually, adding a second video card is probably not the easiest way. My guess is that both outputs from the motherboard are supported, but please show us the output of 'xrandr' so we can check.

xrandr (not logged in as root) gave this result:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 2592 x 917, maximum 8192 x 8192
VGA-0 connected 1152x864+0+53 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 300mm x 225mm
1024x768 75.0 + 85.0 75.1
1152x864 75.0*
800x600 85.1 75.0
640x480 85.0 60.0
720x400 70.1
DVI-0 connected 1440x900+1152+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 410mm x 257mm
1440x900 59.9*+ 75.0
1280x1024 75.0 60.0
1280x960 60.0
1152x864 75.0
1024x768 75.1 70.1 60.0
832x624 74.6
800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 72.8 75.0 66.7 60.0
720x400 70.1

Alright, so it sees both monitors. Try something like this:

xrandr --output DVI-0 --primary --auto --output VGA-0 --mode 1152x864 --right-of DVI-0

Obviously, change the --right-of to --left-of if that's what you want. You can also change the mode resolution for VGA-0 to whatever you want from the list.

Adam

Works perfect!!! Can't thank you enough...

P.S. Adam - After I posted this solved, I rebooted just out of curiosity. It reverted back to CRT primary although it kept my icons on the DVI monitor this time. Found command in terminal and it put it back like it was. Thanks again.

Changes made with xrandr don't remain in effect in between X sessions. You can modify xorg.conf to position the monitors, but there's still no xorg.conf option to keep one monitor primary. I think your best bet would be to add that line to a script and have kde/gnome run that script when they start up.

Adam