Display Fullscreen on Second Monitor

I’m hoping this is an easy question, but I could not find any info in my web searches, so here goes:

I’m running Linux and my machine has two monitors. I can create OpenGL windows in FullScreen mode on the primary monitor. However, I can’t figure out how to tell OpenGL (or glut, actually) to open the FullScreen window on the secondary monitor. Does anyone know how to do this?

There are multiple ways to have an X server span multiple monitors, and which method is applicable to you depends on which you are using.

If you have each monitor set up on its own X screen, then you should be able to force GLUT to put your window on the second monitor by putenv’ing DISPLAY=:0.1 before you call glutInit (haven’t tried that myself though).

To see if this is how you have it set up, bring up a shell window on each monitor and do an echo $DISPLAY. If you see :0.0 on one monitor, and :0.1 on the second monitor, then you have each monitor on its own X screen. Try xclock -display :0.1 or glxgears -display :0.1 -fullscreen

Thanks for your replay.

I tried ‘glxgears -display :0.1 -fullscreen’ amd it didn’t work. It couldn’t open display :0.1.

I’m not sure how to create a shell window on the second display: they are always created on the first display.

Do you know how I can configure the X server to work this way?

Ultimately it boils down to cooking an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Read the docs on that for details. You want “multiple X screens” (websearch tht). If you’re running an NVidia card, you can use nvidia-xconfig to do the config work pretty quickly for various common configs. See the --separate-x-screens option.

An xorg.conf file? I was hoping you wouldn’t say that. This machine does not has an ATI card, so I can’t use nvidia-settings. However, I do have access to an Nvidia machine and I tried it and it worked. So I saved that xorg.conf file and hopefully that will help me with on the ATI machine.

Thank you.

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