Linux on a Precision 360 with Nvidia Quadro FX 500

Yes, I've installed Red Hat 8.0 on a Precision 360 with the nVidia Quadro FX 500 video card.  It worked fine pretty much out of the box for a single monitor.  I did download and install the nVidia driver and use that, instead of the generic VESA driver.  I have XFree86 4.2.1 installed.

However, I haven't been able to get dual monitors to work on this system.  I've tried multiple settings for the XF86Config file, both with and without twinview, using 1 or 2 Device sections for the card.  I have the identical system running Windows XP, and it works fine with 2 monitors, so I know it's not the hardware.  If anyone has any ideas, I'm willing to try nearly anything at this point.

As a followup to my original post, I did finally get the dual-monitor configuration to work.

For the hardware configuration, the solution was to plug each monitor into a separate port of the nVidia Quadro FX 500 board. The board comes with a VGA port and a DVI port. I got a DVI-VGA adaptor and plugged both monitors into their own ports. On my old machine (which had a Radeon card), I was able to use a Y-cable and plug both monitors into the same VGA port. Of course, that card only had the single port.

I downloaded and installed the latest & greatest nVidia drivers from the nVidia website. You need to make sure you have the source for the Linux kernel installed on your machine, since the nVidia drivers need the headers in order to build themselves.

Finally, I was able to get the whole package to work with Twinview. I tried without Twinview, but didn't get that to work at all. I'd rather have a single virtual display, though, so I didn't try that hard.

Here are the relevant sections from the XF86Config file that finally worked:

-------------------

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Server Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "DevInputMice" "AlwaysCore"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "fbdevhw"# Load "dri"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
Load "freetype"
Load "type1"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "NEC LCD1850E"
HorizSync 31.0 - 82.0
VertRefresh 55.0 - 85.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"
# no known options
#BusID
Identifier "NVIDIA"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "nVidia"
BoardName "nVidia Quadra FX 500"
Screen 0
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "NVIDIA"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24

Option "NvAGP" "1"
Option "TwinView" "true"
Option "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "31.0 - 82.0"
Option "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "55.0 - 85.0"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024, 1280x1024; 1280x1024, 1280x1024"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
Option "Xinerama" "on"

SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1280x1024" "1280x960" "1152x864" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
Viewport 0 0
EndSubSection
EndSection