[H-GEN] Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 11:43:25 +1000

[David Jericho]

Ben Carlyle wrote:

> The technical problem as I understand it is the simultaneous
> mapping of several VGA cards onto the same area of memory,
> vying for control.  Each card wants to read from the
> pre-defined VGA memory area, and thus multiple monitor
> support seems unlikely without some other hardware support.

It depends. Are we talking ISA vintage video cards, or PCI? A PCI/AGP
video card worth the money you spend on it, will only grab the VGA/text
video memory riegons if nothing else has them, otherwise it'll just go
through it's PnP setup routines and grab high mapped memory.

> How have people done this in the past?

Putting the two cards in the one computer, and plugging the monitor to
the first video card (first, as in the lowest slot number - Some m/b's
are upside down in this respect).

You've got two ways of doing this well. 

Purchase Xi Graphics Multiheaded X server, or get two Vesa 2.0 compilant
cards. 

The first one has the advantage of being video native, hence fast, and I
believe you can drag windows between screens. 

The second one, is cheap, and you can use two different cards. But the
framebuffer code is only in the 2.1 kernels, so you may have to update a
bit more than just a kernel.