Question: I have purchased two monitors and connected to my desktop / laptop. How do I enable dual monitor setup in Ubuntu?
Answer: You can enable the dual monitor from the Ubuntu display preferences as explained below.
Click on System -> Preferences -> Display, which will display the following window.
Fig: Dual Monitor Setup on Ubuntu
Make sure following are taken care in this window:
- If you see only one monitor, click on Detect Monitor, which should detect all the monitors connected to the Ubuntu laptop or desktop.
- Uncheck Mirror Screens check-box as shown above. When you have this enabled, both the monitors will show the same display, which you don’t want.
- Highlight the first monitor and click the ‘On’ radio button. The first monitor will already be in on state.
- Highlight the second monitor and click the ‘On’ radio button.
- Select the Show displays in panel check-box, which will display the icon to configure the display on the top right hand panel for easy access.
- To change the display order of the monitors, simply drag the monitor to re-arrange them accordingly.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi
I have recently installed Ubuntu 9.10 on my desktop and is fairly new to linux.
Before I had win xp and it found my Tv directly, but with ubuntu it wont.
What do I need to do to connect a Tv as a second monitor?
Currently its connected with scart to s-video.
Thanks
/Arami
I have two monitors to – laptop’s and additional one.
Please tell me, how can I change default monitor – at this moment laptop’s screen is default (menu and dashboard).
:$ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc M64-S [Mobility Radeon X2300]
Thanks,
Vytas
Hey Vytas! In case you’re still wondering:
Btw, I’m using Ubuntu 9.10 with dual VGA,DVI monitors, ATI HD4350 graphics (with open source driver radeon or radeon hd).
It seems VGA monitors are usually regarded as “primary” – what you called “default”.
Go to your places – home folder (with nautilus and ->View->Show Hidden Files on) then into .config/ and open the file monitors.xml with gedit or another editor, and make a backup, in case you destroy something.
For example with log in name vvvv this is the file /home/vvvv/.config/monitors.xml
In that file there are several configurations, look for the dual monitor one and look for the monitor you want to be default – e.g. DVI-0.
There should be a line: primary=no which you change to: primary=yes
Log out and log in again. Worked for me. Also have a look at http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2 they tell you how to change the primary label from terminal. Didn’t work for me, though.
This worked a treat, thanks for the instructions
Hello,
I can get my dual mon to work, but one of them is “shaky”, and “blurry” (best desc I can give).
Any idea’s?? I am using DVI on one monitor and VGA on the other….
thanks
I have latest distro of Ubuntu installed on Toshiba laptop and 2 monitors (laptop and 2nd on Dell).
For some reason now I also see a 3rd , “unknown monitor” in the Monitor preferences.
How can I delete that “unknown monitor” ?
Thanks.
I am using Ubuntu 10.04 and have successfully set up dual monitors with my Asus Eee PC and a 19 inch Dell monitor and everything works well enough (I had different wallpapers for each workspace prior to having dual monitors and that no longer works, neither does Desktop Wall, so if anyone knows a way to fix that, that would be great, but it’s not my main concern).
One thing that is really annoying are these little colored boxes in the top left corner of each screen. On my laptop screen, in the top left corner, is a green box that says “Laptop” (without the quotes) in it. On the Dell monitor is a pink-ish box that says “Dell 19″” in it. I want these gone. They block the menus of any application that is set to full screen and make it incredibly difficult to do anything, not to mention they are just flat-out annoying to look at.
I would think that this could be turned off since it doesn’t make sense to have them there in the first place, but if this is something that is permanent, whoever designed this portion of Ubuntu must have been in a hurry to get it done because it’s such a horrible feature of having dual monitors. So yeah, if you can tell me how to turn these off/get rid of them completely, I would be forever grateful.
Thank you.
I too would like to remove the monitor tags in the corner. Any suggestions?
Great information. I was about to give up after two days of work without results when I found your page. The information from Constantin did just what I needed and now my monitors are in proper order.
Thanks again. Job well done.
Bob Jones