[Tfug] USB2VGA dongles?

[Claude Rubinson]

On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 07:46:12PM -0700, Claude Rubinson wrote:
> I'm interested in spanning my X session across multiple monitors in
> order to achieve more real estate.  It's my understanding that in
> order to do this, I need to add a second video card to my system.
> One option is a dock+video card; a cheaper option would be a USB2VGA
> dongle.  But I've also come across some docs that seem to indicate
> that my T42 can do this innately, though I'm as of yet unclear as to
> how this is possible.  If anybody has any first-hand knowledge, I'd
> appreciate it.

So, a bit of followup as to my investigations here.  As I now
understand it, as long as you have multiple monitor ports (multiple
cards aren't necessary), X can span across multiple monitors.  The key
is the maximum resolution of your card.  The easiest way to increase
one's resolution (and get multiple monitor ports), of course, is by
buying an additional card.  The max resolution of my notebook's card
is 1024x1024, so that's a non-starter.

Harry suggested looking into Matrox's "DualHead2Go," which doubles
your horizontal resolution.  Downside is that it's pricey, doesn't
work all that well (though apparently better than a USB2VGA dongle),
and may or may not be supported under Linux (I saw one person claim to
have it working on an Ubuntu messageboard, but there wasn't any
evidence by which to evaluate the claim).

The best, cheapest solutions appears to be Xdmx, which permits you to
span your X session across multiple boxes.  So I'm just going to plug
a cheap x86 machine into the network and use that.  Incidentally -- if
anybody has a cheap x86 machine that they want to get rid of, drop me
a line off-list.  It needs to boot (either off of hard disk or CD, I
don't care) and have a decent, Linux-supported graphics card capable
of running 1680x1050.

Claude