Second monitor stopped working

Question

After setting up 11.10 today, I seem to be having problems with my dual monitor set up. It worked without issues in Mint but today after I switched to 11.10 only one monitor seems to function.

This seems a little odd to me. During setup both monitors functioned without issue, although they were mirroring each other both monitors but as soon as it booted into Unity my secondary monitor stopped working.

I checked under settings->display and the second monitor doesn't seem to even be detected. On the off chance it had something to do with drivers, I upgraded the proprietary drivers to the latest version with zero success. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

Solution 1

This turned out to be an issue with the settings for the video card. I executed the configuration editor for the video card. In this case by executing

gksu nvidia-settings

I then had to enable the second monitor and restart xwindows and presto it worked.

Solution 2

I had problems with dual monitors in 11.10, when I un-checked the mirror screens I would get this error message "required virtual size does not fit available size: ..." I tried numerous combinations of custom xorg.conf files and default vs. proprietary drivers (I have an ATI dual head card) nothing worked. Out of frustration I thought about reinstalling and older version of Ubuntu. That made me wonder if the problem was Unity or lightdm. I set my default display manager to gdm and the dual screen works!

The command is:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm

gdm may not be installed, to install it:

sudo apt-get install gdm

Comments

[Jorge Castro]

We need more hardware information to help you, can you look at this question and then edit your question adding the information?

[Nate Totten]

Can you elaborate on how you enabled the second monitor? Both my monitors are pivoted (portrait mode) and I don't know if it's even possible to use them that way in Ubuntu.

[Christian Dechery]

OMG, THANK YOU SOO MUCH. I spent about 6 hours today surfing the internet for a fix for my problem. The problem was that settings in amdcccle were not being saved when I clicked on "Apply", it was as if the app crashes! I tried about 15 different ways to fix it and none of them worked. I almost gave up until I found this post and I was like "What the hell, lets give this a try!". Suddenly BOOOM, it WORKED!!! I even reconfigured ubuntu to reuse lightdm after that and it kept working. I would give this post a thousand up-vote if I can!