Dual monitor setup

[Joshua Tinnin]

On Wednesday 29 December 2004 01:17 pm, Michael Collette 
<Michael.Collette at testequity.com> wrote:
> Running up a brand new IBM T42 (2373-CXU) laptop here, that FreeBSD
> seems to love being on.  Can't say enough about how far things have
> come since the first time I tried FreeBSD on a laptop.  Wow!
>
> Anyway, down to my last configuration battle.  I'm trying to get a
> dual monitor setup going with this box using the built in monitor to
> sit along side an external monitor.  I've got this working great on a
> desktop machine, and I tried it out on this laptop with Windows...
> just before deleting it entirely off this hard drive.
>
> I found a couple of references out on the net covering this subject,
> but most all of them were using the Linux ATI drivers.  Tried working
> with what came with xorg's drivers, but all I could seem to get was
> fuzziness on the external monitor.  Never got close to having X
> recognize both displays as a single desktop.
>
> Wondering if anyone out there has had any luck with this?  If so,
> could you post your XF86Config?
>
> As a side note, anybody having luck with OpenGL on one of these ATI
> 9600 video cards?  I kinda had some of the OpenGL screen savers
> working until I upgraded to the latest xorg here.  Now any OpenGL
> that launches dumps core.

ATI cards from 9200 onward are problematic as far as hardware 
acceleration, as from that point on ATI only released binary drivers 
(they do support Linux but not FreeBSD), and they don't release their 
specs. They will generally work for basic 2D pretty well, though 
certainly not as fast as it would if all the memory were being used. I 
have an ATI 9600XP that used to work (poorly) with FreeBSD 5.3 and 
OpenGL, but I had the same experience as you, in that upgrading somehow 
broke that and now it dumps core. But I don't really use FreeBSD for 3D 
stuff, otherwise I'd probably buy an nVidia. I bought the card to play 
Windows games, so I keep Win around on a separate partition if I want 
to do that. It works fine for my needs as it is; YMMV.

- jt