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On 26/08/11 16:40, Joe Buckle wrote:
Hello lovely people. I wondered if anyone would be able to tell me where I can find a retailer that would sell a complete multi-head (multi-monitor) up to 4, with Linux pre installed (preferably Ubuntu, but if you feel another distro would handle this better then I'll take that advice on board). Failing that - would anyone know where to start looking to build a system, and the software I would need in order to make it work. Just a poke in the right direction will do :) Thanks in advance Joe
Okay I've not looked into this much, but I could suggest maybe looking at a motherboard with two 16x PCI Express slots which will take two graphics cards. This way you can probably fit 2 x NVidia or 2 x ATI/AMD graphics cards and use the video outputs from each card to run a monitor.
It also maybe worth looking into the new AMD A-series APUs (that is a CPU and GPU built into the same chip). Looking at the AMD A-Series compatible motherboards (FM1 motherboards for the A6 and A8 series chips) they have onboard video. In theory you could possibly get away with the onboard video and an external ATI/AMD Radeon graphics card.
This gives an example of a similar sort of setup running on Windows... http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-780g-chipset,1785-6.htmlI'd guess at least with the ATI proprietary drivers it would be possible on Linux.
It might also be possible on the Intel Core i3/i5/i7 CPUs with an external video card, but personally I'd like to stick with one make video card for simplicity (which in the case of the ATI cards and AMD A series CPUs you can use the one driver).
Maybe have a look at www.phoronix.com too, they're a hardware/software site that lean more towards Linux and BSD so maybe they might have covered something like this, or maybe someone on the forums might have a similar setup.
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq