Entry tags:

geek, linux, ubuntu

My boss got a huge beautiful new monitor, so I got her old apple display to use as a second monitor today. However, it wasn't entirely intuitive to set up dual monitors on my Ubuntu machine at work: The Apple monitor would turn on for a second and then turn off, which apparently is what they do if they have no signal, but I didn't know that at first. All the instructions said to go to the ubuntu display settings and tell it to autodetect, but that didn't work because it didn't notice the other monitor. So then I went to xorg.conf, which apparently by default is disturbingly short, but I wasn't too sure what to put in. Thankfully, this post came to the rescue. In short, here's what I did:

1. Run nvidia-settings.
   
2. Under "X Server Display Configuration" I could see that my second monitor was there but unused, so I clicked on it to enable it and modified the settings to suit.
   
3. I had already backed up my xorg.conf so I clicked on "Save to X Configuration file." It tossed an error about not being able to parse xorg.confg, but clicking through gave me a "Save X Configuration dialog" where I could click "Show preview" and copy those settings to my xorg.conf
   
4. Restarted X11 (actually, I rebooted 'cause I was lazy and wanted to knit a row of my latest project) and poof, it works!
   

So now that it works, I've also customized it to match the rest of my office with the help of some window cling stickers I had on hand:



I am either terrible at being an adult or awesome at it.