Standardista Kyd

I’m a Linux man at heart, but recently when I discovered my dual monitor setup wasn’t going to work so well, I was a bit disillusioned, and was even considering switching to another platform to get it to workbetter.

Dual monitors is important in my line of work for any number of reasons. Especially now I’m working on a 15″ laptop screen, I need extra real estate to spread my clutter across. Unfortunately having set up my new desk, monitor and laptop, I found that the performance left an awful lot to be desired.

Dual Screens Destroys Performance

After enabling dual screens, my 3d capabilities were wiped out, and even general rendering performance was terrible. Moving a window was reminiscent of the early days of Windows 95 (you know, when you’d see the window contents lag and constantly draw behind where you were dragging them?) Video playback would flicker the screens before starting, and sometimes wouldn’t plat at all. Loading a web page would place such a load on the processor that my music would stutter.

I’m using Ubuntu 9.04, so it’s a known problem that the new driver (while technically superior) is still somewhat wanting in performance, so the first step was to downgrade to the previous and much faster version. Nearing the realease of Ubuntu 9.10, it’s also apparently possible to upgrade to the next version of the driver to increase performance as well, but I can’t verify this.

Compiz in Intel Dual-Screens

Still, after some reading I discovered that Ubuntu 9.04, and the Intel driver in general won’t support any display surface greater than 2048*2048 pixels.

My heart dropped a little bit because both my screens are 1440*900, which when combined while not taller, are much wider than the highest resolution, at 2880*900.

Obviously this kind of performance isn’t acceptable for a modern computer, so just this morning when I was thinking about nixing my setup, I had a curious little idea. What if I changed the virtual orientation of my monitors from side-to-side to top-to-bottom?

This would change my virtual screen size from 2880 pixels across to a mere 1440, and my height would be 1800 pixels; still well inside the 2880 pixel limit. Ingenious.

What would be more ingenious is if the Jaunty or even Karmik could work this out itself and compensate for it, because I know I’m not the only person been bitten by the limitations of this hardware. Luckily I’m happy to work around it in this way (although it takes some getting used to moving the mouse to the top of the screen to change to a monitor that’s physically somewhere else.)

At least if you can manage to pull off this hack, you can get back to a blistering fast hardware rendered desktop experience in your dual-monitor setup.