I promised you a more upbeast post, so here it is…

Work recently gave me two very nice LCD monitors to replace those I’d been using before. 24″ TFT from Dell.

“Unfortunately”, the graphics card in the desktop I had (which I’d been using since getting hired) couldn’t drive these things, so they gave me a HP xw4200 to replace my xw4100, double the RAM and faster processor.

Now my computer can display on my monitors, but side by side things are very wide. But, these monitors can rotate on their stands! (Couldn’t do that with my old ones.) So, I want them vertical and side by side. Well, someone else had done the hard work of figuring out how to make that work, so I went and followed his lead. The distillation of that came down to:

• Install the x.org X server (this deserves a post in itself)
• Edit xorg.conf, turning off Xinerama and turning on xrandr (for now they’re incompatible):
  • In the “Device” Section, add Option "NoTwinViewXineramaInfo" "on"
    and Option "RandRRotation" "on"
  • Change TwinViewOrientation to “Above” or “Below”
  • In the “ServerLayout” Section, add Option "Xinerama" "off"
• Put xrandr -o left at the start of your .xsession

Before and after screen shots at 1/8 scale:

I finally have enough space to have all the xterms I want! I’ve been trying to reach this state since forever, first with screen then with just piling the xterms onto all the real estate I could get. I don’t have to drop context and have space left over now. It’s surprising how good this feels– It’s this slight pressure that I never really noticed, the small frustation of having to look for somewhere to type– gone.