Ask Slashdot: Multiple Monitor Fun

A whole bunch of you have written in about multiple monitor (multi-headed) support in Linux. Is it possible? What's involved? Who supports it? These are all interesting questions, and one person made a point of noting that Windows could do it, and couldn't find out how to do it on Linux. There's also a nifty project in the works involving Linux and a "video wall"! Click below for more...

Christopher Danz had this nifty project he's working on:

"My name is Christopher Danz and I'm part of a team in Washington State University that is building what we affectionatly refer to as a picture wall. It's bank of nine monitors placed in a three by three grid, each controlled by a corresponding 486 processor. Each "computer" consists of a mother board, CPU, video card, ethernet card, and our own homemade boot card (emmulates the boot disk). These nine computers must then in turn by controlled via the ethernet cards by a tenth computer. We've decided to use linux as the operating system on the tenth computer (as well as the nine slaves). The problem is we're having difficulty finding video controlling functions. Each screen is supposed to have the ability to fade, scroll, etc, as well as work together as a whole. Do you know of any locations on the Web we could look for such programming functions?" taliesen had this question to ask about basic multi-monitor support: "I'm looking into putting together a multiple monitor multiple video card system under Linux. The official word for XFree86 is that none of the current X servers support this. I was wondering if there are any patches or maybe even a commercial X server that would support two or three video cards/monitors. Preferably one AGP and one or two PCI, but all PCI would be better than nothing. Any information would be greatly appreciated."

Frag-A-Muffin asked something similar, but he mentions Xi Graphics' AccelX servers. He also thought that XFree86 did support multi-headed displays, but that you had to have two of the same card to do it.

and Aaron W. was looking for a HOWTO, and couldn't find one on this subject...(any volunteers?)

Will the folks with some answers for these please step forward? (grin!)