brant interactive

I got dual monitors working well, except the two screens were basically duplicates - each screen having its own desktop, and control panels. Plus, it wasn’t possible to drag windows between screens. Adding the Xinerama option as shown below seems to have fixed this issue.

(from /etc/X11/xorg.conf)

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "Default Layout"
        Screen         "Default Screen" 0 0
        Screen         "aticonfig-Screen[1]" LeftOf "Default Screen"
        Option          "Xinerama"      "true"
        InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard"
        InputDevice    "Configured Mouse"
        InputDevice    "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice    "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

Fonts are also also a little quirky. The anti-aliasing was really bad. I don’t think I could have stayed with Ubuntu as my primary OS if I didn’t find the solution below. I wasn’t aware of this, but evidently font rendering is a huge deal, requiring lots of full time font rendering people. It sounds sorta silly to say the fonts can be a deal breaker, but when you are working with something all the time, it really is important. The best arrangement I’ve found thus far is by:

getting the ms core fonts:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

then getting the xml config files:
http://www.osresources.com/files/centos-windows-fonts/fontconfig.tbz

then extracting the file into /etc/fonts/ as root:

sudo tar xvjpf fontconfig.tbz -C /etc/fonts/