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Fedora 10 Dual Head Graphics Card

This post details how to install and configure two monitors on a single EVGA GeForce 9500 GT graphics (video) card under Fedora 10.

When I was researching dual head graphics cards for use with Fedora, I came across a lot of forum and blog entries on the subject but most of them contained obsolete or incorrect information – especially about TwinView, Xinerama and the X Window System configuration file. Hopefully this post will provide readers with some useful up-to-date information on the subject.

This particular graphics card (EVGA P/N 01G-P3-N959-TR) was of interest to me for a number of reasons but primarly because the card contains two heads each with DVI-I connectors which would allow me to move away from VGA cabling altogether since my two HP w1907 19″ LCD monitors also have DVI-I connectors. In addition two heads on one graphics card enabled me to free up a PCI slot by eliminating the need for a second graphics card in my workstation.

Using TwinView was also of interest to me because it uses a single X screen, i.e. the driver conceals all information about the two separate monitors from the X server, and both monitors share the same frame buffer. This means that I can continue to use functionality such as accelerated OpenGL without a problem.

There are many graphics cards available which contain the nVidia 9500GT GPU but, to date, few of these cards come with dual DVI-I heads. In addition nVidia fully supports their graphics cards on GNU/Linux and Solaris platforms. Another feature of modern nVidia GPUs which is of great interest to me is their support for the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) architecture which I wish to experiment with a part of a project which I am currently working on for a customer.

You can use a single monitor with this card out-of-the-box using the default nv driver which comes standard with Fedora. However, to use two monitors with this card, you need to download and install the correct package for your specific kernel, i.e. kmod-nvidia-2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.x86_64-180.29-1.fc10.1.x86_64 in my particular case as my present kernel is 2.6.27.19-170.2.35. Selecting this package will cause three other packages to be also downloaded and installed on your system unless they already exist. These packages are livna-config-display-*, xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-*, and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-*.

These packages not not available in the regular Fedora repositories. You need to add the rpmfusion repositories to /etc/yum.conf or to

March 28th, 2009 | Tags: , | Category: Fedora, nVidia, Twinview, Xinerama | One comment - (Comments are closed)

Bootable DVD/CDROM

Have you ever wanted to determine whether a DVD or CDROM is a bootable CDROM or DVD from within a shell script?  If you use GNU/Linux you could parse the output from the isoinfo utility which is part of the CDRecord tools suite.

What if the isoinfo utility is not available on your operating system?  In this case you have to resort to rolling you own compiled langauge utility or shell script.  To do this you need to understand where to find the specific bytes on a CDROM/DVD which indicate whether it is a bootable CDROM/DVD or not.  The relevant specification covering bootable CDROMs (and by extension bootable DVDs) is the El Torito specification which is an extension to the ISO 9660 specification.

Our first shell script uses the dd utility to read in the required bytes which are then sliced and diced using the xxd and cut utilities..  Sector 17 (hexadecimal 11, the Boot Record Volume) contains two bytes at a specific offset which are an absolute pointer to the Booting Catalog which in turn contains a specific byte which indicates whether a CDROM/DVD is bootable or not. #!/bin/bash # # use dd to read in the required bytes # DEVICE=”/dev/sr0″ VERBOSE=1 # get 2 bytes at absolute offset 34887 bchex=`dd if=${DEVICE} skip=$(( 0×800 * 0×11 + 0×47)) bs=1 count=2 conv=swab 2>/dev/null | xxd | cut -d” ” -f2` # get one byte bcdec=`printf “%d” 0x${bchex}` bootable=`dd if=${DEVICE} bs=1 skip=$(( 0×800 * bcdec + 0×20)) count=1 2>/dev/null | xxd | cut -d” ” -f2` if [[ $bootable = 88 ]]; then [ $VERBOSE ] && printf “Bootable CDROM\n” exit 0 else [ $VERBOSE ] && printf “Not a bootable CDROM\n” exit 1 fi

The previous shell script is classical in its approach to the problem in that it uses a number of small specialized utilities to achieve the desired result.

Another way of achieving the same result is to use the extended I/O features of ksh93 as shown in the following shell script. #!/bin/ksh93 # # Cannot open DVD/CDROM for read/write – hence cannot seek # forward on file descriptor. Workaround is to close and # reopen the file descriptor. # DEVICE=”/dev/sr0″ VERBOSE=1 # read 2 bytes redirect 3< $DEVICE || exit 3

March 14th, 2009 | Tags: , | Category: Linux | Comments are closed