It turned out to be pretty easy. I used the nVidia tool to generate my xorg.conf and then just had to do a couple of tweaks. First off, since it was running as a non-privileged user, it wasn’t able to save to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. So I had to save it to my desktop. Then I had to edit it because the nVidia tool didn’t want my second monitor to be an awesome resolution, so I had to edit that manually. Then I just copied it to the right spot. Now it’s perfect. Here’s my xorg.conf:

So, readers may remember that when I upgraded to Fedora Core 6, I lost dual screen abilities. Well, after today’s update of the nVidia drivers from livna, it suddenly was working again (after I tried to set it up). But then compiz no longer wanted to work! That frustrated me as I wanted to have both the advantages of dual screen as well as the helpful and fun eye candy of compiz. Well, Yupman in Fedora’s freenode chat helped me through it and showed me how to change my xorg.conf to make it work.

All I had to add, apart from what I mentioned yesterday was:

Load “extmod” to the Module section of xorg.conf.

Although others have derided it, I think it is an AWESOME addition to Fedora. It really brings the desktop to the eye candy level of Mac’s OSX. A lot of the eye candy is also extremely functional! I wanted to save this post for a video showing the compiz stuff (it doesn’t really work to show screenshots), but I haven’t been having the best of luck with that. I’ll try again in the next couple of days along with my review.

To All Responsible at nVidia for the production of device drivers,

I want to thank you for producing binary drivers for Linux at a time when most other companies don’t feel that the Linux market penetration is larger enough to develop drivers. So thanks for doing that! In fact, that is why I exclusively buy nVidia for my machines whenever possible. Sure, ATI is sharing NOW, but you were the first to divert some programmers to produce it and your reward is faithful customers like me. Of course, supplying closed-source binary drivers is not the perfect solution, as you have no doubt heard from others. However, I think this is an important first step which allows me to use my computer’s hardware to its maximum and allows Linux programmers to make GUIs capable of eye candy rivaling (and in some cases surpasing) that of Windows and Macintosh.

A little bit of info to impart here with respect to using the proprietary nVidia drivers. So, first I went to livna and downloaded the nVidia kernel modules that match my kernel. Then things were running great - even a little better than before, but something seemed wrong. The people in the irc room were unhelpful when I tried to ask them if nVidia was running. When I tried to run BZFlag, it no longer ran! I kept getting GLX missing errors! Turns out that it wasn’t running! I had to go to system-config-display (in Red Hat Fedora) and tell it to use the nVidia card as my graphics card. Then I opened up a terminal and typed init 3 and went to another VT for init 5 to restart the X server. This time I saw the nVidia logo when I got to the login screen. Success!