Two display cards - results

[arnet]

Hi arnet,

Thanks for posting this, that might be very useful!!!

I have two small questions :

1. Why you finally choose not to use the ATI + NVidia together? What was the problem? Was it working or not?

2. Using ATI + NVidia together the way you suggest will mean the glx part of nvidia will not work. This mean we cannot display anything on any screen attached to it right? have you try to see if nvidia-settings --query=… is returning good results?(I think this tool is using the glx/gl part as well)

thanks

Jonathan

1. The “open source” ATI drivers with the most up-to-date OpenGL support are not that stable on 8.04, and they are targetting 8.10 now anyway (personal rant - Ubuntu updates too often and the open source community follows too fast). That was the immediate concern. I didn’t try the restricted drivers, they might have worked better. But longer term I just didn’t want to have to deal with redoing the saving and restoring of libraries every time the drivers or kernel were updated. It’s not really that big a deal. If I hadn’t of had the Nvidia 8400 card in another system I would have probably stuck with it. But an “all Nvidia” solution is easier to manage.

2. Yep. GLX support is built into the drivers and I do not know of a way to make two different drivers have it in Debian. Most installers drop in their own glx libs and link the standard OpenGL lib to the new ones. The Nvidia one also goes on a “search-and-move-to-a-hidden-location” mission for libs from other drivers. You could write a script to toggle between them (see the third link I provided).

–arne