A good friend is letting me permanently borrow his 22″ monitor that he doesn’t use anymore. The timing was perfect, as I was just talking to a buddy about a week ago about his impending monitor purchase, and I mentioned I wanted to try a dual monitor setup, and now I am:

(Click through to Flickr for larger versions, and note the Calculus books making a monitor stand on the 22″ monitor on the right).

A Dell 2405 is on the left with a default resolution of 1920×1200, a Samsung 213T is on the right running 1600×1200, both powered by a single BFG Nvidia 7950GT with the Nvidia propietary drivers on Foresight Linux. This gives me a default resolution of 3560×1200. Here’s a screenshot, click through to see a larger version on Flickr:

It was easier than I expected – looking at a couple seach results in Google showed me how to add to my xorg.conf to set this up.

I added a second monitor section in my xorg.conf with the Samsung information. I then added the following lines in the Section “Screen”:

    `Option 		"TwinView" "Yes"<br />
    Option 		"SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "39-85"<br />
Option 		"SecondMonitorHorizSync" "29-81"<br />
    Option 		"MetaModes" "1920x1200,1600x1200"`

I restarted X, and voila.

You can download or view my xorg.conf here.