As far back as the middle of 2000 I’ve been using multiple monitors for my daily work routine (see this screenshot for some proof. That’s done with a couple of PCI voodoo cards and a built in RAGE AGP card). It’s probably one of the best decisions you can make regarding your work productivity, especially if you work on a laptop. I’m not the only one who thinks this either, Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com frequently extols the virtues of multiple of monitors and points to a study that found that individuals using 2 20 inch monitors were 44% more productive than those using a single 18 inch monitor. Of course, people using a 24 inch monitor were 54% more productive than the 18 inch monitor, and by transitive property, the most productive.
However, with laptops, it isn’t the case that you can just buy a bigger monitor. In fact, I’m probably not the only person who wishes that their laptop was actually smaller – and I’ve got a fairly small laptop right now, a 14.1 inch IBM T43p, but it’s absolutely huge compared to my wife’s X series. To solve some of these issues, I have external monitors both at home and in the office that help out considerably. However, like most things in Linux, multi-monitor support is painful.
Or, rather it was, until Keith Packard gave the X subsystem a good swift boot to the head with XRandR 1.2, which now allows hotplugging of monitors. Gone are the days of having to kill my X session to do a presentation. It’s bliss baby. However, Keith is not a GUI genius, at Boston GNOME Summit 2006 he threatened the community with designing his own GUI. Immediately everyone was revolted as Keith showed the most popular GUI he designed: xmille.
<p>A thumbnail of the xmille GUI. Really, you don't want to click it to see the whole thing, it's painfully bad.</p>
Well, for the most part, the community didn’t respond. In late 2007 when I started running the betas of Ubuntu Gutsy, I needed to features of XRandR 1.2 for presentations. Well, the only GUI at the time, GRandR, was done by a someone working with Keith at Intel, it crashed fairly often. I fixed some bugs, and posted my own git public repository last year. The problem is that I didn’t have time to really maintain the project.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that Ubunty Hardy (2008.04) included a wonderful little applet as part of the GNOME control center, the Monitor Resolution Settings applet. Using this little applet, XRandR 1.2 compliant drivers (basically any open source driver) get a great little GUI to easily set and configure monitors. It even allows the arbitrary location of monitors relative to one another. It’s a great little tool. Now, if only the open source ATI drivers supported accelerated monitor rotation on a second head, then I could actually rotate my 20 inch monitor at home for working on long documents. For the time being, this works well enough. In fact, it’s a lifesaver when giving presentations. Nothing spells tacky like having everyone see your login as you kill X to give a presentation.
<p>The beautiful new monitor settings applet in Ubuntu</p>