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I'm building myself a nice setup with a massive amount of screen real estate. Since I had/have problems with video drivers in the past. I'm asking for advise here first.

I want to connect at least six screens. like this: 6 screen setup

What are the best options? What are the pitfalls? I preferably would not like to use closed binary blob drivers.

usecase scenario: I'm writing a piece of software that has to interact with other systems. I would like to be able to see all of those systems, my code, lots of log files and documentation without the need to swap windows/screens. To just better see what im doing.

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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

I have a 3 monitor rig working with both blob and OSS drivers(blob performance is marginally better and supports opencl much better). That's not a solution to a six monitor quandry.

Dual monitors cards with 2 triplehead2gos should be more than adequate to achieve 6 monitor screen real-estate.

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up vote 3 down vote

You could try an ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 card or similar. Being a single card, it should be easier to configure.

The card requires that your monitors support DisplayPort, or that you use active DisplayPort to DVI/VGA dongles. This is because the card can not drive the clocks for 6 individual outputs, and DisplayPort doesn't require separate clocks for each port.

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I'm interested as to whether this particular card works with and without blobs. Upboat. – Call me V Jun 29 '12 at 8:39
up vote -3 down vote

Windows.

If you can afford 6 Monitors you can afford decent enough hardware to run your IDE in Ubuntu on a Virtual Machine. What you cannot afford is tinkering for weeks with Linux poor multi-monitor support with no stable solution in sight.

Please prove me wrong, I gave up.

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and I've wasted enough time on nasty closed source issues with windows that I don't mind spending some time fixing my linux, which are again mostly caused by closed source stuff. (at least the hard to fix stuff). – Stephan Jul 14 '12 at 16:49
Actually, the X-server is the real problem and closed source stuff (e.g. Nvidia's driver) work around it. Don't get me wrong, I love Open Source and I'm a developer, too. Multi-Monitoring is just Linux' Achilles' heel. You can spend weeks researching but the only thing that achieves is that you know exactly why it won't work the way you want it to and you have found hundreds of user complaining about the exact same thing. – Quelltextfabrik Jul 15 '12 at 12:50
Ubuntu plans to replace/improve the X-server with wiki.ubuntu.com/Wayland. – Stephan Jul 15 '12 at 16:23
Can't wait to see that, though I don't read anything relating to better multi-monitor/multi-graphics-card support. But there is hope. – Quelltextfabrik Jul 16 '12 at 6:30

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