Problems with Ubuntu 11.04

Hey guys,

I just installed Ubuntu 11.04 on my desktop. When I have only one monitor plugged in, it works fine; however, when I have both monitors plugged in, the secondary monitor continuously flashes whilst the main monitor adopts the (smaller) resolution of the secondary monitor. Also, when this happens, the computer basically freezes (although the mouse can still be moved).

Any ideas on why this might be?

Cheers

My question would be if you have the correct or up-to-date drivers installed for the video card to work properly? I'm sure 11.04 has the same thing as my version 10.10, select "system" then "Administration" then select "Additional Drivers" and see what is there. If the O.S. advises that you are running with current and up-to-date drivers for the card, than I don't know what to tell you. But if your not running with an official open source Nvidia driver, or running with an incorrect driver, for sometimes Ubuntu will allow you to "fall back" and run with an older driver, than any of those issues could be holding you up.

mmm, agree with zen - what sound card do you have?

i meant graphics card, of course

"Sound"? Maybe you know something I don't, but what would knowing this guy's sound card information help with a video card problem? He's trying to get two computer monitors going at the same time, not two sound systems going at the same time! Again steeve you might be onto something here that I have no clue about, but at this junction, until I know where your going with this line of questioning, I will continue to say ((WTF))!?!

good point zen - my apologies

I've not had the time, inclination, nor the necessary extra monitor to dabble with multiple monitors, but as far as I know, for it to work with the xorg floss drivers you need to do some manual editing of xorg.conf... for what you want to do, the proprietary driver may be the best option with the least manual configuration involved. fglrx will also be the far better choice for the HD6xxx (northern islands) cards at the moment.

Seeing as you've provided next to no information on the system itself - I will assume it's the system in your "specs". For ATI cards you will want to install the fglrx driver, this should support multiple monitors, configurable from the amd ccc which will usually be installed along with the driver - to do this on 'buntu you can follow Zen's advice and do it the gui way or you can open a terminal and install it using aptitude/apt-get...

No apology is needed, I just think you might have gotten a little ahead of yourself and didn't quite grasp what was going on here. But if anything you gave me a pretty good ((WTF)) moment!

Lol ... trawling through online forums told me that you have to use ATi catalyst to specify that you want two monitors to not show the same image, and then use the 'monitors' thing. Funny, it seem so logical to me now

Thanks for the help anyway guys