Ubuntu 12.10 second monitor not detected at all

Question

I have a desktop system in which I just spent a small fortune replacing the motherboard and graphics card because I thought they were broken, and after doing so, I still have the same problem. The second monitor, the one plugged into the DVI connector is not detected at all. I have read dozens of posts with similar problems, but none of the solutions have worked for me. I have run dual monitors on Ubuntu almost since the beginning of Ubuntu with no problem.

Anticipating questions back.. yes, I have the correct sources installed and the Nvidia 304 driver installed after installing the sources and headers.

I am at a loss, as this is my main work machine, I NEED two monitors, and I have been trying to solve this for over 24 hours (except for the 4 hours I was asleep). Any one got any clues at all?

regards Derek

Answer 1

I had the same problem with my laptop's docking station - I wanted to dock the laptop and use my 2 monitors instead of the laptop's screen.

At first I used the latest driver from NVIDIA's site which helped my laptop identifies the monitors. After that I used nvidia-settings to configure the monitors every time I docked the laptop at work. This option was annoying since I had to play with the NVIDIA driver every time Canonical updated the kernel.

Several days ago I had a conflict with the packages that Canonical distribute and my own installation of NVIDIA's drivers so I decided to uninstall both of them and start over using this answer. After rebooting the machine - my monitors were detected automatically and all I had to do is un-check the 'Mirror display' checkbox in the 'Display' system settings in order to get my working station ready.

Please note that I didn't try running any graphic intensive program.. so there might be issues with that.

Good luck!