Today I upgraded my linux development box tu Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn, mainly because I read it run Beryl out of the box. Unfortunately “out of the box” means “not your box, intinig”, and I had Beryl crashing on me and leaving me without window borders and unable to drag anything.

While trying to understand what was happening I opened a terminal window and it was blank. I was lucky I rememberd my previous post, and the fix worked even for the window borders.

As they say, “3D Desktop for teh win!!1!”, big kudos to Ubuntu for their unbelievable development pace.

Today I installed Ubuntu 6.10 to test a development environment and once again I forgot how to set up TwinView so it correctly recognizes my LCD display as primary monitor and the CRT display as secondary. The nVidia driver always recognizes the CRT display as the primary one, no matter what you tell it to do with the various options at your disposal.

I went into panic / google / forums / what-else mode for a few hours then I was able to find a solution to this widely spread problem.

Here’s the snippet that saved my life (taken from /etc/X11/xorg.conf):

Section "Device"

Identifier"nVidia GeForce 6600"

Driver"nvidia"

BusID"PCI:1:0:0"

Option "TwinView" "True"

Option "UseEdidFreqs" "True"
  Option "MetaModes" "DFP: 1440x900 +0+240, CRT: 1280x1024 +1440+0"

Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP,CRT"

EndSection

The most important option there is TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder and I hope I will never forget to set it in my future X.Org configurations