Re: [gentoo-desktop] questions and sundry gripes about X11 multihead (it's a rant)

[Brent Busby]

On Mon, 30 Dec 2013, Fat-Zer wrote:

> Could you be more specific? e.g. provide some links to bugs, mail
> archives or whatever with subj discussions. I'm using multihead
> ?Zaphod mode?, or whatever it's called, on nvidia's blob for 3 years
> and haven't noticed any problems. (Except I had some KDE3/TDE-related
> ones. But It's an another story...). Xorg.0.log yields that RandR is
> disabled but I still can rotate/resize screen with xrandr. So I never
> faced with issues you're talking about. On the other hand I'm a bit
> concerned about all this situation. Because it would be damn sad if
> whoever will drop support for it in future.

Sorry, I was just in a bad mood and spewing generally about things. 
Just for starters though:

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?20384-Zaphod-mode-with-the-Open-Source-Driver

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-x11/2013/06/29/msg001263.html

I did get the impression during my trawl of the forums that the nVidia 
closed driver still offers some support for this configuration, but even 
that is depressing to me:  As soon as we reach a point where only one 
non-FOSS driver is fully supporting a feature that used to be a basic 
part of X-Windows, it's basically dead.  It's now become a perk of 
running nVidia hardware that will be with us for only as long as nVidia 
wants to continue indulging us.

And that support only comes in a driver that the Linux kernel developers 
understandably don't like very much...

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ Sr. UNIX Systems Admin +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ James Franck Institute +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ Materials Research Ctr +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky