TwinView, openSUSE, and the NVIDIA driver

A week ago, I bought a 37″ LG LED TV for my living room. It’s cheap and has a lot of features. After buying a 10 m DVI to HDMI cable, I connected the TV to my development machine, which also happens to be in my living room. It’s great for watching HD movies late at night or playing games when I feel like taking a break.

My development PC runs openSUSE 11.4 and has an NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT graphics card. It’s old, but it’s perfectly good for my needs. I’m using the proprietary NVIDIA driver and a great tool that comes with it: NVIDIA X Server Settings.

Here’s how to configure both displays and make the changes permanent.

Configuring TwinView

1. Open NVIDIA X Server Settings and select X Server Display Configuration. You should see your displays there - in my case, my primary monitor and TV.
2. Select the disabled display and click Configure….
3. In the Configure Display Device dialog, choose TwinView and click OK.
4. Adjust the display resolution and refresh rate if needed.
5. If you want the selected display to be the primary one, select Make this the primary display for the X screen.
6. Click Apply. Adjust the options until you’re happy with the results, but leave NVIDIA X Server Settings open.

Saving the configuration

1. Open a terminal, become root, and open /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-screen.conf in a text editor.
2. In NVIDIA X Server Settings, select Save to X Configuration File, then Show Preview.
3. Find the Screen section in the preview. Copy its generated Option lines into the Screen section of 50-screen.conf, immediately after the Monitor directive.
4. Save the file, close NVIDIA X Server Settings, and log out. After the X server restarts, your saved settings should be applied automatically.