The ultimate workstation?

This is my new workstation, with three 17” TFT monitors running off two graphics cards to give a total resolution of 3840 by 1024 pixels. It’s running Ubuntu Linux. It was a little tricky to get triple monitors working under X11, but well worth it for the result.

Here’s some technical information for help anyone else trying to do the same thing.

I’m using an nVidia dual-headed AGP card for the middle and right-hand monitors, and it’s using the commercial binary driver from nVidia ( nvidia). The left-hand monitor is connected to a PCI card with an ATI chipset, with the Free ati driver.

This driver combination is dictated by the fact that the commercial ATI and nVidia drivers have packaging conflicts that prevent both from being installed simultaneously, and the Free nVidia driver doesn’t support dual-headed mode.

I also turned on Xinerama in X11 which allows the desktop to extend over three monitors.

My X11 configuration file might be a useful reference.