On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 10:38:34PM -0500, Jim Cornette wrote: > The programs suck. Configuring the displays to work was pretty easy > though. Did you have to manually edit your configuration files to get > things setup or were you able to use some easy to run tool? > > In windows, the second display presents a text message on screen that > tells you where to go to configure the second monitor. You follow the > text directions on the second display and you are all set to go. I agree, configuring X via a GUI to take advantage of anything more than the most vanilla configuration is a recent development. One should understand, however, that the priority over these many years has been to make X even work on hardware that is often not well documented, etc. > I'm impressed that you can use dual-displays for a decade now. It would > be better for this feature to be easier to configure and work for more > cases than only for special configuration of the files or customized > programs. *XFree86* hasn't supported multiple displays that long, but *some* X server has, either on Sun equipment, or the Xi Graphics product for i386 (which I used on Linux and Solaris long ago). Multiple screen support was a fundamental design element of X -- that's why your $DISPLAY variable is :<xserver>.<screen#>. On Windows, AFAIK, one still just gets a single simulated large display. In the past, multi-head was achieved with multiple video adapters -- [and those adapters, e.g., Matrox, had to have a special feature to turn off the VGA hw registers on all but the first card]. These days, commodity cards support dual-head, though often with various limitations (like lower RAMDAC speed on the second head), special setup requirements that are not (well-)documented by the vendors, etc. One still needs special Option lines in the device config to correctly select analog, flat-panel, TV-Out, etc. on various cards. And auto-configuration depends on auto-detection, which involves things like DDC probing, matching to a database of hardware quirks and monitor types, determining which bit-depths can be supported on each card/screen, etc. Remember, for the most part, X drivers have been developed by third-parties, not the hardware vendors themselves, who supply the Windows drivers that take full advantage of their product. Bill Rugolsky
