What type of video card is in your machine?

[badbass]

I am looking to upgrade a video card in a ubuntu pc. Is it feasible to get a pciE card with dual Hdmi. What is in your machine.

[Guest spazi]

If you are thinking about using the GPU to crack passwords, you should look into Radeon gfx cards :)

[cooper]

I have had numerous videocards over the years and they all worked just fine. PCIe is something the kernel deals with and you're safe to assume this Just Works . Dual HDMI shouldn't pose much of a problem, but you're going to have to configure how X is going to handle that. Do you want to stretch your desktop over these 2 screens in which case how do the screens relate to eachother (1 left of 2 or right of 2, that sort of thing), or do you prefer to have both of them show the same image? I've never liked dual-monitor setups myself so I don't have any experience in this field. You need RandR support in X to properly make use of multiple monitors.

Without a doubt the very best Window Manager to use in case of a multi-monitor setup is Awesome. Just look at the 6-screen setup on that website. From what I understand when it comes to "power user window manager", this is the bees knees. Wether you like the look and feel of it is something you'll have to decide for yourself. Other Window Managers are likely to work fine just the same, so long as you don't go beyond 2 or 3 screens as they weren't designed with such setups in mind.

Edited August 27, 2014 by Cooper

[Ftb]

I believe NVIDIA has better linux support, there are ATI drivers available, but just don't perform as well.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

[badbass]

Thanks again you rock

[cooper]

I believe NVIDIA has better linux support, there are ATI drivers available, but just don't perform as well.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

In my experience, which I'll grant you is from over 6 years ago now, the binary nVidia driver rocked. A very solid performer that was quite easy to set up. It came with a tool that would compile their kernel module for your kernel (so don't go too bleeding-edge on them). Just tell it where to find the kernel sources, wait a bit and away you went.

However, my current laptop and my current desktop both have AMD/ATI cards in them and they both work just fine with the official drivers, though, as I said, I don't do multi-screen setups. With the AMD/ATI cards you get a binary blob. On Gentoo this process is simply installing a package. You end up with a /lib/firmware/radeon folder. Tell the kernel which of the binary blob(s... my desktop requires 1 blob, my laptop has a newer cards and required I think 5) applies to your hardware and you're golden.

All provided hardware-accelerated video playback which, frankly, was all I cared besides the basic point of getting an image on the screen.