Hi, Gang,
I recently acquired a "new" surplus Dell Precision 690 Workstation in trade for some repair work I did. Here's a quick sketch of the system:
Precision 690 Workstation:
Single Xeon 3.4 GHz Dual-Core CPU with Hyperthreading (yeah it's not a slowpoke).
4GB ECC Registered RAM (I forget exactly what spec - came with the machine and it works when the riser cards are seated properly.)
CD-RW drive (IDE, secondary Master)
DVD-Multi-Format Burner (IDE, secondary Slave)
No Hard Drive originally - I added a Hitachi 7200 RPM Sata 3 1TB drive this evening. (Newegg, for a nice price)
Dual NVidia Quadro FX 4500 Dual-DVI video cards on optional Dell riser card, but missing SLI bridge board.
Dell M990 19" CRT Display on card 1 primary output via DVI/VGA converter
Acer M163X 17" wide aspect flat panel (1366x768) on card 1 secondary output via DVI/VGA converter
The usual peripherals (wireless USB mouse, PS/2 Dell QuietKey keyboard I've had like... forever.)
Okay. This thing is a BEAST! It's swift. I did several installs (with formats) just to thrash the new drive around some, and each one took about ten minutes from start to finish, no kiddin'. I shudder to think what it would be like with a second CPU in it.
I've tried a number of different video hookups between the two monitors: one in each primary port, both on the primary card, both on the secondary card, one in the primary port on the primary card and the other in the secondary port on the secondary card...
I can't seem to get KDE to recognize both monitors. I've tried using the standard display configuration tools in PCC, but I have not really delved into the X setup yet. I was kinda hoping I could eventually populate and use all four video ports in a really slick multi-head setup but I don't know now...
Has anyone had experience with a dual video card/multi-head setup who might be able to point me at the fix for this one? I would sure love to learn a little more and maybe get the most out of this system.
Side note: I pulled down and installed the PCLinuxOS 2011.06 KDE this evening - the brushed metal theme gives PCLinuxOS a nice "business suit" to address earlier criticisms someone had leveled somewhere about consistency of design. It's a very charcoal-grey Armani kinda thing - very nice.
Y'all see if you can't help me out on this one, please?
Thanks,
D
