You cleaned up your desk!

I also use a Unicomp Model M and a Logitech trackball (the one you move with your thumb, like this one). It's bliss, IMO. Still single monitor, though.

You forgot to mention the coaster on the end.

But that sucks dude, hope you get it all sorted out soon.

well, I think eric has to pan right on the pic becaus it seems likely I know where the stuff on that side of the desk went.

Bummer.  E16 works for me with Intel and KRandrtray.  

Nice keyboard.  I thought about buying one yesterday but was put off by the Windows keys.  This might change my mind, thanks.

+Will Hill is right, this keyboard is as awesome as old-school.

What sort of Linux driver support does the GT640 have?  Being unable to light up the second card with different content sounds a lot like a driver issue.

+Will Hill Unicomp sells a "Linux/UNIX" model with the Ctrl and Caps Lock keys swapped, which is what I have. No Windows keys! This is what Mark Pilgrim (when he was still around) used to call the "RFK"— I'm pretty sure +Eric Raymond knows what that acronym stands for.

Really though, don't hesitate to get one, they're so well built. I've always preferred buckling spring keys and positive key feedback. A side benefit is that if someone attacks you in your office, they double as a bulletproof shield or a bludgeoning implement.

+Jay Maynard Yeah, cleaning up was sort of necessary. And no, +Dave Taht that crap didn't end up on the floor - Cathy has it in the dining room (along with most of the rest of the former overbuden on my floor) and is excavating for uncashed checks. :-)

I have the same keyboard.

And the same phone; just purchased it about two weeks ago and love it.

/me wants proof

+Dennis McCunney
 I was using the latest version of the nVidia proprietary drivers. My conclusion was that either the card was individually defective or the nVidia drivers suck.

I don't really care which explanation is true.  I'm not buying their hardware again.

+Will Hill Actually I'm now really glad for that Windows key. I have it bound to be i3's command key prefix.  Nothing else uses it!

If I'd gone with the Alt default, w3 would have been in contention with Emacs for who gets to own it.

I note this was originally the lowest end nvidia card we could find....

+Daniel Stoddart
 ROFL. "Real Fucking Keyboard" indeed...the only one!  And yes, it would indeed be a suitable bulletproof shield or bludgeoning instrument.  But I keep a loaded .45ACP within arm's reach on a shelf to the left - so as not to have to damage the keyboard that way, you understand

+Eric Raymond Offhand, I'd say the drivers sucked.  Note that they probably don't suck on Windows and do as expected, but while you can use proprietary drivers on Linux (I do so on an old notebook using ndiswrapper), results aren't guaranteed.

I used to have a double-headed Matrox card that was pretty well supported   Matrox even made a triple headed version, beloved of stock traders who could have browser and email on one screen, Excel on another, and real-time stock data on a third.

Something like that might be an option for you, since your usage is primarily reading text, and you aren't concerned with getting that last few FPS in Quake III death match.

Right, and as a matter of interest +Dave Taht gave me the keyboard for Christmas and had left me the first Auria after one of his stays here.

+Eric Raymond Actually I'm now really glad for that Windows key. I have it bound to be i3's command key prefix.  Nothing else uses it!

Concur.  As long as the OS recognizes the existence of the key, I'm happy to have it, as it's one more key to bind something to and avoid contention.  You can always remove/paint over the Windows logo.

+Dave Taht >/me wants proof
Proof of what?

+Justin Andrusk
That the random crap on my desk didn't just land on the floor off to the right of it, almost certainly.

I cheerfully admit that his skepticism is justified.
 

Thanks for the feedback.  The contention issue I was worried about was more physical than software related.  When the space is divided with too many keys, they all become so small that hitting any of them is hard.  The sub normal sized keys on my X61s are a good example of this and an unwelcome change from my trusty X30.  

I don't think the "Linux" keyboard comes with a trackpoint, but I can put up with the nasty little Windows keys as long as they are easy to hit.  This is what I find, http://pckeyboard.com/page/category/EnduraPro

Unicomp's search and configurator tools could use a little work. 

+Will Hill >Unicomp's search and configurator tools could use a little work.

Yes.  Yes they could.

You have the trackpoint a centimetre away from the home row, why would you reach all the way over to the caged sphere?

+Bk Mcdonald Because I'm used to it that way.

This is similar to the experiments I did a couple of years ago, though I ended up going with dual 30", through no fault of my own.  I actually ended up deciding to go with a single 30" 2550x1600 instead of two 22" 1080P displays, but then I didn't upgrade my laptop that year so I got offered another 30" instead.  I tried using nVidia for the card, but ended up going with an older ATI because it just worked better.  The nVidia would lock up after around 5 days of use, seemingly no matter whether I used the Ubuntu driver or the nVidia FTP site one...  I also dabbled with i3wm, but in the end I've just gone back to KDE at the moment.  I keep threatening to go back, but haven't yet.  I liked the keyboard mobility, but not as much as I had hoped.  Have you tried "keynav"?

+Sean Reifschneider
Haven't tried keynav.  I'm not interested in retiring my mouse;  wgat attracts me about tiling wms is not the keyboard-drivenness but rather the fact that everything on the screen is working surface.

Then i3 will probably work better for you than for me.  I was mostly interested in retiring the mouse, and it did a good job of that, but for many things it still felt very awkward.  I'm a pretty hard core touchpoint user, it's been probably 6+ months since I even plugged my external mouse in, and the only uses of it over the previous 6 months were rare use on a test rig.  Still though, keynav can be handy for picking which of the xterms I want to type into.  I usually use the touchpoint, because it's so easy, but sometimes the keynav just feels right.  Nice to have choices.  :-)

I like lots of work surfaces, that's why I still love E16.  The max number is 32 desktops, each with 64 virtual screens, a total of 2,048 working surfaces each with a nice pager representation.  One day, hardware will catch up to that.  I use two to four desktops with 3x3 screen arrays but have occasionally had more.  E16 works reasonably well with multiple monitors.

http://173.21.69.124/photo_album/chron/desktop/2011_08_19-saving_the_right_deskspace/index.html
http://173.21.69.124/photo_album/chron/desktop/2012_01_23-e16_multi_monitor_howto/index.html
It got a little more painful to switch between single and multiple screens since I wrote that article.
http://173.21.69.124/photo_album/chron/2009/2009_12_11-alt_tab_in_e16/index.html
http://173.21.69.124/photo_album/chron/desktop/index-e16.html

i had to use "arandr" to control my dual screens but i have a Nvidia quad 1800 w/nvidia drivers.

the monitor on the left is physically broken, there is no nvidia or linus fault unless he hit it in the panel with his middlefinger.

+Will Hill I was interested in your comments about tall vs wide monitors.  A long time ago, I worked for a unit of Citibank.  Citi had a venture capital unit, and one of the things they funded was a monitor that could be rotated 90 degrees to be tall rather than wide.  (This was back before the PC took over the world, corporate desktops might have an Apple II with an 80 column display card running VisiCalc, and the intended use case was things like workstations connected to servers where "tall" might better support things like word processing.)

I do some occasional DTP, and my wish list item was a monitor big enough to display two side-by-side 8.5x11 pages in actual size.  (Or two tall monitors side-by-side with a page on each.)

My current monitor is a 23" widescreen doing 1920x1080 that comes close enough to what I want to make me happy.  (I'd have liked higher vertical resolution, but what I got was available that day from a store when my old monitor needed emergency replacement, and what I wanted would have cost about twice as much as what I got if it had been immediately available.)

My SO's laptop is one of the ubiquitous wide-screen models, and I've never understood people who run apps full screen on them.  Fine for watching video, but less fine for reading text.

If it was the nVidia card/drivers that's a new one. I make a point of nVidia now when it's a choice that isn't going to end up horribly expensive (so, AMD laptops and their graphics do happen...) as I've had so much trouble with Catalyst - and the open source drivers (at least at the time) were not yet capable of doing something I needed.  Good luck. And: amdcccle at the root prompt might be a necessary thing.

I tried tall versus wide.  Tall can often be nice, but I found the displays didn't look nearly as nice when run in tall mode (portrait) as they did wide (landscape).  So I pretty much just went with wide.  Which is VERY wide with 2x 30".  I used a monitor arm that would allow me to switch between the two modes.

I use `pivot to tall' only for reading code, that is the only use for me for this.

The problem with "tall" is that on some displays the pixel aspect ratio goes wrong, messing up small fonts which is probably what you wanted tall mode for.

Current state of play: the new card is here and installed. It's driving both monitors just fine.   xrandr can see both outputs, but when I try to use it to put them side by side it says:

"screen cannot be larger than 2560x2560"

Since I have two 2560x1440 displays I guess it needs a 2560x2880 virtual display, but I don't get why it doesn't just configure that.

Now investigating to see if xrandr can force that.

So what graphics card did you wind up with?

Yes you need Virtual 2560 2880 in xorg.conf

+Jay Maynard Radeon 7750.  Seems to be work fine.

+Lukasz Jaroszewski I don't have an xorg.conf.  I've been trying to beat Xorg into generating one - so far without success.  When I run xorg -configure it thinks I'm trying to start up another server and barfs, not generating the file I want.

My Linux box has a 7660D in it (as part of the A10 APU). It works well for my purposes.

You might be better off Googling an xorg.conf than generating one.

+Eric Raymond have you tried xrandr --auto switch with --output/--right-of|--left-of ?

+Eric Raymond also for amd afaicr you will have to use smth like DVI-{n} as an 'output' arg. 

+Lukasz Jaroszewski Yes.  Adding --auto makes matters worse instead of better; it fails to detect both outputs and falls back to a failsafe VGA mode.

I am very interested in the findings in this thread... as I would like to setup a triple-head system.

If you'd stuck with nvidia, you could have run "nvidia-settings", turned the knobs in the gui, and had it write you an xorg.conf with either two X screens, or "twinview" (where its all one big virtual screen).

Manually editing xorg.conf is so 5 years ago. ;P

I3 with multiple monitors makes for a wonderful working environment. I love giving presentations using i3 because I can snap my slides or code editor back and forth between my laptop and the projector screen at will.

Does nvidia-settings really fix things or do you have to hack the config file and modelines like the manual says?

http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/173.14.09/README/chapter-13.html
ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/302.07/README/configtwinview.html

+Scott Doty Ah yes, I see you are another person afflicted with insane optimism about the nVidia tools. What nvidia-settings (aka "that profoundly useless piece of trash") actually did was tell me I wasn't running the nVidia drivers when, in fact, I was. Then it refused to do anything further.

Well, the most common cause of that -- and I'm not saying that this is what happened in your case, just that it happens all the time -- is that the nouveau (sp?) framebuffer driver was loaded during initrd, which prevented the nvidia drivers from loading.

And that would be something to complain about, because getting nouveau blacklisted in ones config is a mess, involving dropping an entry in /etc/modprobe.d, using dracut to rewrite the initrd image, and maybe even passing a "blacklist=nouveau" kernel option for good measure.

And I'm putting this comment here, not because of any "insane optimism", but simply because other Linux users might benefit.

If you are interested in the right answer, there's a suggestion.  If you are interested in "being right" -- then Sir, you are completely correct, and you can have the last word. ;)

Wait, what?  You can't just add driver="nvidia" to your xorg.conf? You have to blacklist the free driver to make nvidia work?

It's academic now; I don't have an nVidia card anymore, and short of being forced at gunpoint never will again.

I have finally gotten dual-head working with a tolerably small amount of xorg.conf hackery. Blog entry to follow.

+Eric Raymond Ah, good to hear there's more progress and that you are nearly done. Look forward to your next post on this subject.

+Scott Doty  I see you are another person afflicted with Insane Optimism About the nVidia Tools  Heh, welcome to alleged membership in the ioant club. :)

Actually, nvidia-settings just happened to work best for me, for that one time I set up a dual head system. Grepping my logs always reminds me, "nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel." So yeah, I respect that history.

+Eric Raymond  If you don't have an xorg.conf, try creating a new file in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d.

FWIW the proprietary Nvidia drivers work all right for me, aside from occasionally not wanting to put my GNOME panels on the right monitor if I plug in an external (but I think that's a problem with GNOME.) But then again, my card was based on a much older chipset than yours.

If you want to stick with open-source drivers, AMD is definitely the way to go, as they actually have their own people working on them.

Holy smokes, is that a... Logitech TrackMan?

Mechanical keyboards, TrackPoints, TrackMen, tiling window managers... I get the feeling that these are hacking-ergonomic Schelling points.

+Jeff Read: Perhaps, but not universally...I'm using pretty much the opposite of all of those.

+Jeff Read  Yes, that is a TrackMan.  I'm almost as attached to them as I am to my Model M keyboards. Yet another design that's a vast improvement on its successors.

+Daniel Stoddart  I would like one with Esc and Caps Lock swapped (Cult of Vi member). Then i could delete my xmodmap line from .xinitrc. Do they make one of those?

I don't see anything wrong with remapping keys in software, myself. I've swapped capslock and control for years now.

+Max Eliaser
 Of course there is nothing wrong with remapping keys. It is awesome. Still that Caps Lock key shouldn't be there IMHO.
Here is a nice joke on remapping:
http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/xmodmap.html

7750 is southern islands, right? The open source "radeonsi" driver might not be complete yet. Some parts pretty much all other drivers have like s3tc are still missing.

So it might be a good idea to use the latest kernel, Mesa and xf86-video-ati with one of these. Typically even git master works very well.

You are using the open source drivers, right?

+Christoph Haag  Yes. +Susan Stewart clued me in that their only disadvantage over the proprietary ones is somewhat slower 3D, which I don't really care about.

+Eric Raymond that and video playback, although that's getting fixed: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTM0OTA

+Eric Raymond I understand that you are using the i3 window manager and a radeon HD 7750. Just out of curiosity what brand of linux OS are you running?

and the blog post arrived the next day.  
https://plus.google.com/108967323530519754654/posts/XqceUm2oQxp
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4905