I had some trouble setting up dual monitors on centos with an nvidia card. I managed to track stuff down, so I thought I'd make it public on the list. I have an nvidia quadro nvs 290 in a Dell, recently installed centos5. Same stuff should apply for other nvidia cards. I needed nvidia-x11-drv.x86_64. It is available from rpmforge. Installing rpmforge is described on this page(http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/RPMForge). If you just open the display panel and choose dual monitor settings and restart X, X can't get started and gives error messages. When I restore the old /etc/X112/xorg.conf, it comes back to life, without dual monitors of course. Here are the actual commands I entered as root: yum install yum-priorities echo 'priority=1' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo echo 'priority=1' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Media.repo echo 'priority=2' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo echo 'priority=2' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/epel-testing.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/adobe-linux-i386.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-free-updates.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-free-updates-testing.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing.repo echo 'priority=3' >> /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmfusion-nonfree-updates.repo wget http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/x86_64/RPMS.dag/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm rpm --import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm yum --localinstall rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm yum localinstall rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm yum check-update yum search nvidia yum install nvidia-x11-drv.x86_64 I originally googled around for a howto, it took me much more effort than it should to find http://wiki.centos.org. Wonder if there is a way to get google to give better results? Found someone with similar problems, someone suggested installing the right thing but neglected to point out where it comes from. So I was getting this: sudo yum search *nvidia* Loaded plugins: fastestmirror, security Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile * rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * epel: mirror.its.uidaho.edu * rpmfusion-free-updates-testing: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * rpmfusion-nonfree-updates: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * extras: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * rpmfusion-free-updates: mirrors.cat.pdx.edu * updates: repos.lax-noc.com * base: mirrors.xmission.com * addons: repos.lax-noc.com Warning: No matches found for: *nvidia* No Matches found Which versions of RH or FC correspond reasonably well to my version of centos? uname -a Linux 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5 #1 SMP Thu May 7 10:35:59 EDT 2009 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux thanks, Dave
p.s. I logged out after installing the nvidia drivers, and used applications>System tools>nvidia X server settings to get dual monitor working. The panel autodetectedd my monitors fine. I clicke 'x server display configuration' and then 'configure'. choices are 'disabled', 'separate x screen', and 'twinview'. I at first thought I wanted 'separate x screen', but that's wrong, I'm still not sure what it was doing. Anyhow, I could not move anything between monitors in that mode. So I tried twinview, and now the two monitors are acting like one big monitor and I can move stuff back and forth. I would never have chosen the name 'twinview' for that, since they are not twins at all. Dave
>-----Original Message----- >From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] OnBehalf>Of Dave >Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 2:23 AM >To: centOS mailing list >Subject: [CentOS] nvidia dual monitor setup centos howto > >[...] >yum install nvidia-x11-drv.x86_64 > >[...] >Which versions of RH or FC correspond reasonably well to >my version of centos? >uname -a >Linux 2.6.18-128.1.10.el5 #1 SMP Thu May 7 10:35:59 EDT 2009 x86_64 >x86_64 x86_64 GNU/LinuxI use CentOS 5.3 i386/x86_64 flavours If I were you I'd look more into dkms and the dkms-nvidia-packages. Those are more current, than the driver package in nvidia-x11*. Or if all else fails, why not get the proprietary Nvidia drivers? -- /Sorin -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 5106 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20090616/ebc8e7ff/attachment-0001.bin>
On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Sorin Srbu<sorin.srbu at orgfarm.uu.se> wrote:> >>Which versions of RH or FC correspond reasonably well to >>my version of centos? >>uname -a >>Linux ?2.6.18-128.1.10.el5 #1 SMP Thu May 7 10:35:59 EDT 2009 x86_64 >>x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux > > > I use CentOS 5.3 i386/x86_64 flavoursA typo erased part of the question (and more googling erased some of the need for it). I was originally asking what howtos to look at, since I couldn't find centos howtos. then I found wiki.centos.org. Is it really of no interest to anyone else which rev of RH corresponds to which rev of fedora and centos?> If I were you I'd look more into dkms and the dkms-nvidia-packages. Those > are more current, than the driver package in nvidia-x11*.Useful suggestion. The wiki page I was looking at made no helpful distinction between them, so I picked the one that sounded simpler.> Or if all else fails, why not get the proprietary Nvidia drivers?Well, all else did not fail. And they want me to run a script that does I don't know what, outside the record-keeping that goes with yum/rpm. Also, nvidia's web page made it sound like I was in for an editing session on xorg.conf, which is beyond me. Maybe I misunderstood. Dave
Nicolas Thierry-Mieg
2009-Jun-16 15:29 UTC
[CentOS] nvidia dual monitor setup centos howto
Sorin Srbu wrote:>> yum install nvidia-x11-drv.x86_64 >> > If I were you I'd look more into dkms and the dkms-nvidia-packages. Those > are more current, than the driver package in nvidia-x11*. > > Or if all else fails, why not get the proprietary Nvidia drivers?just to clear things up: the nvidia drivers available in rpmforge *are* the proprietary nvidia drivers. They're just conveniently packaged in an rpm, and use dkms for auto-rebuilding. And they don't upgrade to the latest version every time nvidia releases one, which can be good or bad depending on your needs. This is true both for nvidia-x11-drv and dkms-nvidia-x11-drv: the latter is simply a newer version with a name change, and it's the one you should use (but anyways if you installed the older package yum upgrade should offer to upgrade to dkms-*). Regards, Nicolas
On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 9:18 PM, Sorin Srbu<sorin.srbu at orgfarm.uu.se> wrote:>>This is true both for nvidia-x11-drv and dkms-nvidia-x11-drv: the latter >>is simply a newer version with a name change, and it's the one you >>should use (but anyways if you installed the older package yum upgrade >>should offer to upgrade to dkms-*).Yeah, I had asked yum to install nvidia-x11-drv, then later when I explicitly tried to install dkms-nvidia-x11-drv it had already auto-updated and yum reported nothing to do. Maybe not completely idiot-proof, but the score is yum 1 idiots 0 on this court today. Dave