Stretching Your Desktop Onto a Second Monitor with the Millennium G400 Card
You’ve no doubt heard the computer-age observation that you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM or hard-drive space. It’s true. Particularly the latter part. But in this age of rampant GUI (Graphical User Interface) usage, it overlooks yet another commodity of infinite desirability: virtual desktop space.
You’ve no doubt heard the computer-age observation that you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM or hard-drive space. It’s true. Particularly the latter part. But in this age of rampant GUI (Graphical User Interface) usage, it overlooks yet another commodity of infinite desirability: virtual desktop space.
The most obvious way to max out your virtual desktop is to use a big monitor and a high-end graphics board to run Linux at some phenomenal resolution, like 1920×1200. That’s not a perfect solution, though, for a few reasons, not the least of which is that you probably already have a serviceable monitor that you’d have to stick in a closet, sell, or give away.
A second approach is to use virtual screens, where your desktop is really much larger than your physical monitor and scrolls when your mouse reaches the screen edge. This is a solution that I find more annoying than helpful. Multiple virtual desktops, as supported by KDE and GNOME, are useful, in that they let you jump between full-size screens of desktop by clicking a button on their panel. But that doesn’t let you see more than one desktop at a time.
The best solution I’ve found so far is a dual-monitor configuration, something I’ve been playing around with since it required using a CGA or EGA card plus a monochrome adapter in the original IBM PC and PC/AT. Thanks to the synergy between hardware and software advances,…
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