Peter Boy wrote:
Does the Matrox run in DVI configuration with the open source XFree driver or do I need the binary Matrox (still-in-beta-for-several-years) driver?
I don't have an answer to the DVI question, but I do have a comment about Matrox dual-head cards in general. I have two machines that are both dual head. One uses a dual head Matrox G450 card and the other uses an nVidia GeForce2 MX 100 and an Intel i810.
The Matrox requires those perpetually in beta drivers to run in xinerama mode (or at least run will, as far as I can tell) while the other configuration with the two different cards doesn't require any special drivers.
As I think others have commented, with any dual-head XFree configuration I know of you're probably going to have to give up direct rendering and have to live with being able to view motion-video (like DVDs) on only one "head." Of course, for some people the extra screen real estate is worth the trade off.
One more thing worth mentioning, if you use KDE then you may not be happy with its font rendering on a dual-head machine. Gnome is ok, but with KDE you really need to turn off the font server (xfs) and specify font paths in XF86Config directly, even then though KTerm fonts are awful.
Peter
