Dual DVI success

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Hi everyone,

I promised I would write back with the results of my attempt to assemble a
RHEL3 system with two flat panels, both using DVI connections.  So here it
is.

The short version: two Radeon 7000s (one AGP, one PCI), two Dell 1703FP
1280x1024 flat panels.  Works great out of the box if you disable DRI in
XF86Config.  No artifacts, stable image, uniform color across both 
displays.  Very nice.

I ended up ordering a prebuilt system from a vendor we've used fairly
often.  It came with two 64MB Powercolor Radeon 7000 Multi-Display Edition
video cards (Evil Wizard): one AGP and one PCI.  The vendor picked the
specific card - all I cared about is that they were Radeon 7000s with DVI
(because they are cheap and have a PCI version).  These cards also have a
VGA connector and TV Out.  lspci calls them

01:07.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV100 QY 
[Radeon 7000/VE]
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV100 QY 
[Radeon 7000/VE]

I added two Dell 1703FP flat panels.  These have DVI connectors and a
native resolution of 1280x1024.

I did the Redhat Enterprise Linux WS 3.0 installation myself.  There was
only one problem.  After the installation finished, the system rebooted
and the primary screen (only one is setup by the installer) went blank as
X started.  The system appeared to be completely hung.  Nothing on any of
the four video connectors (2 DVI, 2 VGA) and I couldn't switch to a
virtual console (even once I bypassed the firstboot script and started
"for real").  Yet, the monitor connected to the primary card's DVI output
was reporting a 1280x1024, 60Hz signal.

I should interrupt myself here to mention that the system came with an
nForce2 based motherboard (ugh, my bad for not specifying) so I had no
ethernet support to login remotely and see if the system was really alive.  
Unfortunately I did not think to save the XFree86 logs - but they looked
normal to me.

I did the RHEL WS installation several times (out of curiousity - at this
point I knew what was wrong) to see if the installer would come up with
something that worked with DRI.  The first install was with both cards in
place and the BIOS set to use the PCI card as primary.  The second try was
with just the AGP card (BIOS still set to PCI since I hadn't seen the
option yet :-)).  The third try was with just the AGP card and BIOS set to
AGP.

Those all hung in the same way after the initial reboot.  I did a fourth
installation with both cards installed and the BIOS still set to AGP. But
right after the installation, and before the reboot, I switched to a
virtual console and disabled DRI in XF86Config.  It worked beautifully
from there.

I added the usual stuff to XF86Config and both screens look great, with
DVI, but no DRI (which I do not care about in this application).  I can
send the XF86Config file to anyone who cares.  I merely turned on
Xinerama, added the second Device and Screen sections and inserted BusID
lines.

I hope this is helpful to someone.

 - Bill Hamblen



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