Choosing distro for multi monitor setup.

This is actually about my desktop but I trust the people here more than anywhere else with information so I'll ask away. I've experimented with linux before (fedora core and ubuntu), but since I could never get them working the way I liked I've been sticking with XP for my secondary PC. Its a multi monitor setup and that was the real kicker, could never it to work for both monitors (I'm sure if I knew more about linux I could but, I don't). The PC consists of a P4 @ 2.66ghz, gig of ram, couple of hard drives, and an ATI X700 Pro which both monitors are running off of. I'd like to try and migrate to linux on my PC for numerous reasons (I'll spare you them), but I need to decide on a distro. Basically its just used for browsing, sometimes a bit of photo work, a lot of multimedia stuff (music, videos, etc), I use it for storage and just in general its the PC I try little "experiments" on all the time (I need my lappy working 24/7 so I don't risk stuff with that). Just curious which distro would fit my needs best, and which one would easily allow me to use multiple monitors without having to jump through flaming hoops (I guess that's asking a lot from linux though, hahaha).

PS: I was already thinking trying out ubunut 7.1, you think that might be the way to go?

 

I haven't used multiple monitors so I can't tell you about that, but Ubuntu and Mint are both easy/good distros overall

 

Hmm, well you know maybe I'll switch my second monitor over to my lappy and just go with ubuntu, 7.1 looks pretty nice and it seems a lot more "finished" than 7.04.

 

You can use it with Linux, you just need to configure X properly to use both displays (generally just a "Option "TwinView" Enable" line in your xorg.conf file). If you want to switch between them, I've seen talk of scripts that will watch ACPI events for a screen being plugged in and automatically switch it on. But there's no simple way of doing it under Linux at the moment.

 

They util in ubunto to setup both nvidia and ati card for dual display
am not boot into linux

but for ati fglrxconfig and for nvidia-setting for nvidia cards

 

I've had multi monitor's working on 6.10, and 7.04, havent tried with 7.10. I do remember having to edit the xorg.conf and using the nvidia 'control pannel thingy' in my case.

 

it's not working out of the box with ubuntu 7.10...
had to edit xorg.conf...was quite painful but it worked...

dont know if one distro is better than another one in this case..