Dual monitor broken in Ubuntu 11.04

Question

I upgraded from 10.10 to 11.04 and now my dual monitor support seems broken. When booting, I see the screen duplicated just fine on both my laptop as my external monitor; after logging in, however, the external monitor disables and cannot be enabled.

Hardware:

• Dell Studio XPS 1640 laptop
• GFX: Ati Mobility Radion HD4670
• Extenal monitor: Acer P193W

I get the following error message when applying screen settings:

The selected configruiation for displays could not be applied requested virtual size does not fit available size: requested=(3040,900), minimum=(320,00), maximum=(1600,1600)

lshw output:

  *-display
        description: VGA compatible controller
        product: ATI Technologies Inc
        vendor: ATI Technologies Inc
        physical id: 0
        bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
        version: 00
        width: 32 bits
        clock: 33MHz
        capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
        configuration: driver=fglrx_pci latency=0
        resources: irq:50 memory:d0000000-dfffffff ioport:2000(size=256) memory:cfef0000-cfefffff memory:cfe00000-cfe1ffff

Screenshots:

Solution 1

You can configure it with ATI Catalyst Control Center (Administraive). It is available from System -> Preferences

Solution 2

You're able to resolve that issue by removing .config/monitors.xml. Steps are: 1.rm ~/.config/monitors.xml in terminal 2.log out and log in 3.call monitors utility and setup your 2 monitor configuration again.

Comments

[Aron Rotteveel]

Sadly, this has not solved my problem. In fact, when adding the virtual parameter, both my laptop and external monitor do active, but are stuck at a max resolution of 1280x800 or so. I have removed the parameter and am now again stuck with only my laptop. Any ideas?

[James Henstridge]

Looking at your question again, it looks like you might be using the proprietary fglrx driver. Perhaps try switching back to the standard drivers instead. With my Evergreen series Radeon card, the standard drivers work fine with multiple monitors (I don't have an xorg.conf, and it defaults to a 8196x8192 as the maximum size). The standard drivers perform a lot better with this card on 11.04 than they did with 10.10, so it might be worth trying them out again.

[Aron Rotteveel]

This has not solved the issue.

[vincent]

Worked for me ( Ubuntu 11.10 ), but I used the proprietary after the upgrade to oneiric