Xorg/Multiple monitors

This page describes the setup of multiple monitors under Xorg. Multihead-support in X has luckily progressed in recent versions, so it's pretty easy to set up. It's as simple as defining monitors.

Basic setup
The basic procedure is defining one "Monitor" section per Monitor and then tying everything together in a "Device" section specifying the video chip driving the monitors. For the following examples we assume, that the Xorg configuration is stored in `/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d' and there is no `/etc/X11/xorg.conf' (alternatively all files in xorg.conf.d can be combined to form an xorg.conf). We create one file per monitor. The following example is the basic version for two monitors of the same resolution.

Each "Monitor" section needs to contain an Identifier, everything else is optional. The identifier may be freely chosen. The placement of the monitors is done relatively with one of the keywords RightOf, LeftOf, Above or Below. (Additionally there is Relative keyword for fancy cases.) Each monitor can recieve custom options (e.g. resolution) in its configuration.

Now we need to map the monitors to the actual outputs. This is done in the "Device" section describing the video chip and driver. In our example this would look like the following.

Here the names are of the form "Monitor- " were port is the name listed in "xrandr -q". This should be everything you need for the basic setup.

More complex cases
First a more complete third example of a monitor file, with resolution options. Here you see, that one can also use the manufacturer names to get a single config file attached to a single device.

First a more complete example of the video configuration for .

The following was made for for radeon driver. Notice the change of the video output name on the same laptop.