[H-GEN] Dual Montiors

[Christopher Biggs]

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Anthony Irwin <anthonyi at toolboxsoftware.com.au> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> Hi,
>
> I have a laptop with Debian unstable and an external monitor. I was
> wondering if it is possible to treat the laptop lcd screen as one monitor
> and an external monitor as a second monitor and use them to display
> different information.

Definitely maybe!   

It will depend on whether your video chip has dual video controllers
(often called CRTCs, even when they're not _C_ontrolling a _CRT_).  If
your laptop has TV out, it very probably has dual video controllers.

There may be issues of chipset imposed restrictions, and also linux
driver limitiations.

For example, the ATI Rage Mobility (common in notebooks, including
most Dells) can do simultaneous LCD+CRT on some models, on other
models it can do simultaneous TV+CRT but the hardware disables the LCD
if any external device (CRT or TV) is in use.


> could someone please offer google search terms as I
> don't know what to search, also any tips would be good.

Use lspci(8) to find the make and model of your video device, and
search for that plus "dual" or "dual head".

--cjb


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