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I have an odd problem, which I think I at least have well described. First, I'll describe what I want to do:

I want to run two monitors on my desktop PC, I want to drag windows between the monitors, just as I would in a windows PC setup using the "extended display" option.

The issue began with an observation: that with two graphics cards running two displays independently (using the open source ATI drivers) I observe a flickering/disappearing mouse pointer and very sluggish system performance. Unplugging a monitor removes the issue. Hoping that I could solve the performance issue by using proprietary drivers, I switched to them.

Now, when I install the proprietary drives using the "additional drivers" option, I find that the system has completely disabled one of my cards (as observed via the amdcccle GUI). When I enable, through amdcccle, and reboot, I find that my xorg.conf is overwritten during boot up, again, one card is disabled. When I fix this issue (via commenting out the "start" lines in my /etc/init.d/gpu-manager.conf) I find that the changes I make via amdcccle are now persistent between reboots.

However, when I enable the card and successfully detect the monitor, I find that on reboot, I see my desktop on one monitor, and on the other monitor, I see a flat black display, which shows a small "X" instead of a mouse pointer, when I mouse over to the monitor.

Enabling Xinerama complicates the issue - both of my monitors now show my desktop background, and I can log in via either, however, unity never starts. The only way I can get back into a bootable desktop environment is restoring the xorg.conf file.

I'm quite confused, and have never encountered this issue when running two monitors off of one card. Because of my available cables, and because I have two cards, I'd like to run a display off of each card independently.

Here is the output from lspci | grep -i VGA:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Redwood XT [Radeon HD 5670/5690/5730]
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Redwood XT [Radeon HD 5670/5690/5730]

Here is the output from xrandr:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 8192 x 8192
DFP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DFP2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DFP3 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
CRT1 connected primary 1680x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 474mm x 297mm
   1680x1050      60.0*+
   1600x1200      60.0  
   1400x1050      60.0  
   1600x900       60.0  
   1360x1024      60.0  
   1280x1024      75.0     60.0  
   1440x900       75.0     59.9  
   1280x960       60.0  
   1280x800       60.0  
   1152x864       60.0     75.0
   1280x768       60.0
   1280x720       60.0
   1024x768       75.0     70.1     60.0
   800x600        72.2     75.0     60.3     56.2
   640x480        75.0     72.8     67.0     59.9
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  • xvba-va-driver
    – noobninja
    Aug 23, 2015 at 13:16

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