D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] Other problems while mounting Buffalo HDD

 

On 02/10/12 19:46, Martin Gautier wrote:
> I guess my point is, after this rant (sorry about that), has anyone
> got any sort of reliable combination of good cards, monitors, drivers,
> distributions that actually works, at a decent clip, with 3D,
> twin-headed setups and continue to work when the drivers are upgraded? 

I don't deal with multi-monitor linux setups much anymore (any clients
with multi-monitor setups are usually either graphics/design people with
Macs or finance or programmer types on Windows) although for a very long
time before I reluctantly joined the modern world and bought a DFP, I
ran 3 x 21" Sun CRTs on a single workstation. Windows handled that giant
display setup effortlessly and I distinctly remember it was absolute
*hell* to get it working for longer than a few minutes under Linux. I
couldn't even begin to tell you how many days if not weeks I spent
hacking about on the X setup, drivers, etc.

>From personal experience, two way setups are much easier to control and
definitely doable under Linux. Older type Nvidia cards I have personally
used and know full well to be capable of what you want are the 7800GT,
9600GT and 8800 (any). I have also used AMD 6850/6870s successfully for
this. All of these are older cards now and probably pretty cheap on Ebay
- the 7800GT is so old you could probably get one for free.

The monitor(s) really don't matter, as long as it's not got something
unexpectedly weird like a BNC connector or a massive 30" panel that
requires DVI-D or something proprietary. Any Linux distro should do,
just use whatever you're happiest with. Ubuntu sucks though and they get
everything wrong these days so I'd steer clear of that - Mint, Suse,
Fedora, Arch: all should be fine. In all cases, I was using the standard
drivers from my distributions (historically usually Redhat EL/CentOS,
Fedora or Debian) and sometimes updated versions in 3rd party repos if I
wanted the latest and greatest for testing.

I can't stress enough that YMMV, but these are the combinations I have
personally used myself and they all fit your conditions.

Regards

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq