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