m50d's Journal: Fun with dual-head

As I write this I have finally got a dual-headed system up and running. My sig's semi-ironic begging for a geforce2 unexpectedly paid off; props to cannon fodder 0109 who sent me one. As this was a PCI card, I decided to get down a monitor from my attic and set up a dual-head system.

My first troubles appear to be due to two of my PCI slots not working. Is this normal, perhaps a result of me firmly shoving a pci card just beside the slot I was aiming for? Or is it a cause for concern.

Anyway, after removing my winmodem and rearranging my other cards (the fan on this card makes the two pci slots next to it unuseable) I was able to delve into the fun that is X configuration. My initial manual efforts proved futile, while running xorgcfg yielded a working dual-head system, but with my AGP card only running at 640x480. With a little investigation I determined this to be because of the monitor, however no amount of fiddling would persuade it to run at higher resolution. I eventually hit on the bright idea of searching for the model (taxan multi vision 875) to find out what the settings could be. No luck; all I could find was specs and config for the later + and + LR versions. However, I copied the xf86config for a +LR and discovered that although the default mode was too high for this monitor, other modes worked. Some of them looked pretty good. So then it was time to binary search for the maximum HSync. I'm not sure if there is a proper way to do this, but by reducing the max hsync by 8kHz I got a monitor that worked immediately in 1024x768. I turned down my primary monitor (on the new pci card) from 1152x864 to match this and enabled xinerama, which is very nice. (As a linux user, I can choose whether to have independent desktops or a single stretched one). As a Gentoo user I was expecting to have to recompile kde with USE=xinerama, but was pleasantly surprised to find that it already had support. The extra space comes in really handy and kde is set up to take advantage of it nicely, although noatun keeps displaying the track in the bottom-right corner of the left screen rather than the right one, even though kopete puts notifications there with no difficulty. Hmm.

So there I was, feeling all smug, and I rebooted only to find my second screen horribly positioned up and to the left on the monitor. It had been like that at first, but I'd just adjusted it, but it seems to snap back whenever I change video modes. Hopefully it will acquire a "memory" for the right position, I've had monitors that do this for a little while after being brought out of storage, but in the meantime it's rather a pain to have to keep readjusting the thing for 3 minutes each boot. Anyone got any suggestions?