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Xinerama 

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Xinerama

X has always had multi-screen support. XFree86 goes one step further and introduces Xinerama, which links displays together. The displays form a single, large desktop while X clients think they're talking to a single monitor. You could make a 3x3 video wall and watch your DVDs on it. You'd need lots of video cards though!

It's convenient for some things, but not everything. And until window managers and desktop environments support it well enough, it's a bit kludgy for my tastes.

Still, here's a screenshot of it. I'm linking two 1280x1024 displays side by side. The resolutions don't have to be the same, but KDE is much happier that way (and the screenshot is rectangular, not L-shaped). This gives a virtual resolution of 2560x1024. Nice!

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Two 1280x1024 displays linked with Xinerama. Click to enlarge (501 kbyte 2560x1024 JPEG file).