Dual Head Working. ie Two screens configured.

[mgreen]

I configured two screens on my PC-BSD system ( P111 @ 450 ), by running the configuration program to generate a new XF86Config file. It works OK, EXCEPT for the following problem. If the second screen is switched off at boot time, the system will hang on boot. The only way out is to switch the second screen on and the machine off/on. Also when I fitted a manual KVM switch in line with the second screen ( so I could switch it over to a Win98) I found that the PC-BSD system would hang if the second screen were switched over to the Win98 on the in-line KVM switch. This is MOST annoying. If you have only one screen configured, you can boot the machine fine with it switched off, although it may revert to 640X480. This is obviously necessary for lights out working. You should be able to do this if you have two (or more) screens.
Incidently there is one wonderfull thing about dual screens. If you select a remote session to another system from the login screen (whether Mandrake, Ubuntu, another PC-BSD, or Solaris) the remote system somehow detects that you have dual screen and provides you with two screens in its X session, even though it has only one screen configured locally at its end. Fantastic ! Also note that it is much better than dual screen on Windows. With that you only get one toolbar. With PC-BSD, Linux, Solaris you get a toolbar on each screen. If you want to move windows from screen to screen you have to enable Xinerama, but I think that offers no advantage. There are one or two bugs in KDE whereby sometimes a program started on screen 2 will send its prompt to screen 1 , or vice versa . I am trying to compile a list of these programs. Also if you alter the panel attributes in KDE sometimes it applies the changes to both screens and sometimes not. Again I am compiling a list of thses things. Unfortunately I have to start over with the latest KDE version at v1.3 .