Elon Flegenheimer

NVIDIA dual monitors on an Ubuntu laptop

I recently rebuilt a laptop. I tried the Nouveau driver, but the laptop's battery life plummeted to an hour so I headed back to the proprietary NVIDIA driver. I used to use twinview and had a custom xorg.conf with a single script to run xrandr. For some reason that still eludes me the same configuration isn't working this time around. It's still Ubuntu 12.04 and the same display. I noticed that when I activated twinview the fonts got messed up on the laptop screen but were fine on the larger display. I wanted to more fully configure each monitor to resolve that, but I didn't see how to do that through twinview. So I let nvidia-settings generate a new configuration. Then I made the following changes:

Change Monitor0

Option    "UseEdidDpi"  "FALSE"
# Option    "DPI"  "144 x 144"
Option    "DPI"  "96 x 96"

Note that the higher dots per inch setting is what messes up the fonts.

Change Device0

Option         "RegistryDwords"    "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

Enable the brightness keys on a Lenvo W520.

Change Screen0

# strip metamodes

Xrandr

Once the second monitor is added I use xrandr to enable, disable, and configure the additional screen.

# enable the second screen
xrandr --output LVDS-0 --auto --pos 0x0 --output DP-0 --auto --right-of LVDS-0

# disable the second screen
xrandr --output LVDS-0 --auto --pos 0x0 --output DP-0 --off

The new xorg.conf (without twinview or xinerama):

# nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings
# nvidia-settings:  version 331.20  (buildd@allspice)  Wed Dec 18 09:07:35 UTC 2013

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    Option         "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Lenovo Group Limited"
    HorizSync       56.5 - 67.8
    VertRefresh     50.0 - 60.0
    Option         "DPMS"
    Option      "Primary" "true"
    Option    "UseEdidDpi"  "FALSE"
    #Option    "DPI"  "144 x 144"
    Option    "DPI"  "96 x 96"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
    Identifier     "Monitor1"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "HannStar Display Corp HH251"
    HorizSync       24.0 - 80.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 75.0
    Option         "DPMS"
    Option          "RightOf" "Monitor0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "Quadro 1000M"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
    # Screen          0
    Option         "RegistryDwords"    "EnableBrightnessControl=1"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "Stereo" "0"
    # Option         "metamodes" "LVDS-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0; LVDS-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0"
    # Option         "metamodes" "LVDS-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DP-0: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0; LVDS-0: nvidia-auto-select +0+0, DP-0: null"
    # Option         "SLI" "Off"
    # Option         "MultiGPU" "Off"
    # Option         "BaseMosaic" "off"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

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