Eyefinity across 3 displays with a AMD Radeon 6800

Question

So I purchased a computer recently and have been trying to customise the display.

AMD Radeon HD 6800 series Ubuntu 10.10. I have three 22inch 1080p LCD monitors that are mounted together. Everything is working smooth.

How do I get the 'big-desktop' display where I have one enormous display across all monitors?

Linux - ATI Catalyst Control Center 11.2 does not give me an option to 'group' my profiles like the pictures on their site show with Windows.

Answer 1

I'm running a similar setup, and unfortunately as far as I know it is still not possible to have the true Eyefinity configuration. At least in my case the three monitors were correctly usable out of the box. Although I have yet to see any advantages to installing the Catalyst drivers versus the open source drivers. Ubuntu handles the three monitors very well though. There are methods to getting games to span the monitors with enhanced resolutions, however a lot of games don't support Eyefinity resolutions. You can manually resize windows to span monitors, however watch out for some Compiz enhancements which will crash and restart X beyond a certain window pixel size. I think wobbly windows is one.

The only real reason to having one big desktop resolution is gaming. Otherwise it becomes annoying for Windows to always maximize across three screens such as a browser giving you two monitors of white space. For productivity, you don't want Eyefinity with the grouping features. Just extend the desktop.

I'd upgrade that TV next, with a connection to your comp since its so close. Stream TV instead.

Answer 2

I've been looking into this as well and best I can tell, the issue is that your window manager (Gnome) uses the xinerama extension to get hints about monitor locations and uses them to place maximized/fullscreen windows. If you can prevent this, you'll get your wish.

In compizconfig-settings-manager, under General Options, Display Settings, disable Detect Outputs and delete any outputs and you should be able to span windows correctly.

Alternately you can try setting your resolution similar to the example. Be sure to remove the example which will be like 640x480+0+0.

The other way involves reconfiguring X to not load the xinerama extension.

Note that the xinerama extension is distinct from the xinerama feature. You'll see in /var/log/xorg.0.log if the extension is being loaded, and you can verify that with the command xdpyinfo | grep XINERAMA.

I don't have the answer for how to prevent the extension from loading, but I was unable to stop this via xorg.conf using the fglrx drivers.