New video card!

got a new video card yesterday. Since this is almost certainly going to end up on Google, I’ll use complete sentences and try to check my spelling.

Now, let me preface my little tale with the following fact:
I work 3rd shift at a technical support company. This means that I was awake all night prior to this whole event. For the curious, I’ll include approximate times for the various events.
And now, on with the show.

21:30, 2004-03-19: I wake up. This isn’t in itself a spectacular thing; I wake up most days. I ended up getting to work at abour 23:45, and leaving at 08:00. I had some plans to play disc golf on the 20th with some friends and my parents, but there were weather concerns which scrapped those plans. But I’m rambling. At around 11:00, I headed over to CompUSA with the purpose of pricing out a new video card. But this Radeon 7000 64MB card just appealed to me so much that I bought it. Cost: about $70.
12:00, 2004-03-20: I install the card. Now, I had no fantasy that it would work right out of the box, since I’ve been using Linux exclusively (well, at home at least) since around the time Windows 98 was released. I got all the connections put right, and cranked it up. This particular Radeon 7000 is the one with dual-head VGA ports. I’m particularly in favor of this (it’s the reason I bought the card in the first place). When the system booted, I was greeted with my POST screen, memory test, and Linux boot logs on both monitors. Eh, fine with me; I’m not doing anything else with that other monitor until X starts anyway. I try what looks to me to be the correct optoins; I change the BusID on both of my previous Device stnazas to reference the “radeon” driver, and restart X. X starts up with no problem (although it did take a lot longer than I expected to actually start X; with my Voodoo cards, X started from console in about 5 seconds. With this Radeon it’s closer to 30), but instead of the nice wide Xinerama screen I was expecting, stretching across both of my 17″ monitors, I saw my mouse cursor on both screens, moving in tandem when I bumped the mouse. That isn’t quite right. Time to crank up Google on my other system here and see what I can discover. After banging around with a bunch of options that didn’t quite work, I finally got frustrated and went over to a friend’s house for some beer, lunch, and a movie. If you’re wondering, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is pretty good. I can recommend it, but I wouldn’t suggest seeing it for a first date or anything.
I got home at around 22:00 (it’s still the 20th, and please note that I had now been awake for over 24 hours). Even though I know I should go to bed, I make a personal vow to fix the stupid video cards before I go to bed.
It is at this time that I would like to personally thank every person who ever sumbitted a wordy, extremely detailed question to a mailing list like “lists.debian.org” or LUG distribution lists, or to a site like “linuxquestions.org,” “linuxjournal.com,” and “linuxanswers.net” (I’m going backwards through my search history & typing the sites that are purple). Keep those posts verbose, people! Withough the hundreds of posts with the keywords “Radeon VE” and “multi-head”, I would probably still be working on this.
In any case, I eventually got it working. My XF86Config file is on the “more” section. Incidentally, if you want to set up your Wacom tablet and have it work correctly in programs like the Gimp while still having a Xinerama multiple-monitor config, there’s some tips in that XF86Config for you, too.

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devlogic

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