There is a program out there for Windoze called Maxivista. All it does (essentially) is make a video device (i think it's an emulated ATi Rage Pro, actually) and then pipes the output to some kind of remote desktop software (something like VNC). Then the main PC acts like a server and you can connect other machines to it, and they act like extra monitors on the server.

I used to use MaxiVista a while ago on my Windoze box for Photoshop (you really need all the space you can get). However now my laptop is running Linux. So I cannot install MaxiVista - and I'd really rather not use Wine. I want to keep my laptop as open-source as possible.

Is there an OSS equivilant out there that'd work? Or another solution? I *could* use the TV out on my video card - but honestly I'd rather not. The scan lines drive me crazy.

Cheers

I think you can make a multihead system and install additional video cards that will allow you to extend your desktop across multiple monitors.

Here's a commercial version:
http://userful.com/products/how-it-works/?p=dm

I feel like I saw an article recently talking about how to do this same thing using single video cards and monitors... Maybe google will help...