Dual-Monitor Setup (HDMI+VGA)
Howdy Trisquel!
Few months back, my friend and I have built a workstation for him. He has a dual-monitor setup where one monitor is connected as HDMI-HDMI and another as HDMI-VGA, in the format Monitor-Machine. It was working fine until he applied recent system update. The VGA side loses signal often, but comes back when HDMI side is unplugged.
Here are the machine specifications,
[1] Motherboard: Barracuda Asus KCMA-D8
[2] CPU: AMD Opteron 4280 (2x)
[3] Memory: 8GB DDR3 Reg ECC RAM (8x)
[4] GPU: MSI Nvidia GT-710-2GD3-LP
[5] OS: Trisquel 9
Any ideas?
Regards,
RG.
I am a translator!
Do you mean that the first screen is connected via the HDMI output of the GT-710 and the second screen via the VGA output of the KCMA-D8? What do you mean by HDMI-VGA? Is the the input to the second screen an HDMI input, then I assume there is a kind of converter to generate the digital signal on HDMI from the analog signal coming from the VGA output, is it so?
I have a machine with the same boards, I have two screens but one is only connected to other computers, I could try connecting it to the same computer but I don't have a converter so that would be with a VGA input (my screen has one).
Are you using the default kernel (4.15)?
[1] HDMI output of GT-710 <-> HDMI Cable <-> HDMI input of Monitor A
[2] VGA output of GT-710 <-> VGA Cable <-> VGA2HDMI Cable <-> HDMI Cable <-> HDMI input of Monitor B
Using default kernel.
I am a translator!
I tried the same but using VGA input on monitor B (I don't have this VGA2HDMI cable, it looks like this is not just a cable, there is necessarily some chip inside).
Monitor B did not display anything but screen properties showed the presence of a second screen. However, very soon monitor A went off. I disconnected monitor B then but monitor A still remained off. The mouse sharing with another computer still worked. I unpluged and replugged monitor A, after a while, I had an empty screen with the mouse pointer only, perfectly controllable but nothing else. I tried some things on the keyboard, after a while, the X server was shut down and I had console message about ongoing shut down with a number of unusual error messages.
So not only I cannot make it work but it also makes me lose control of the computer. I think I actually tried that with the DVI output and it was equally bad.
Thanks for trying it out.
In my case; monitor A always work correctly, but the monitor B loses signal often and comes back when monitor A side is unplugged.
I also tried swapping monitors' places and the result is same as above.
Another interesting this, things were working fine until my friend applied recent system updates.
> VGA Cable <-> VGA2HDMI Cable <-> HDMI Cable
As a wild guess, have you ever tried to plug the VGA2HDMI cable directly at both ends, or is it impractical to do even for a test?
Assuming, of course, that the problem is not directly related to the system update.
Oops! My friend is actually using that.
So the setup is like this:
[1] HDMI output of GT-710 <-> HDMI Cable <-> HDMI input of Monitor A
[2] VGA output of GT-710 <-> VGA2HDMI Cable <-> HDMI input of Monitor B
If you were into spending money on it, you could buy one of the blobless nvidia cards we talked about awhile back that allows you to run 4 hdmi displays:
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/50-blobless-video-card-can-drive-4-hdmi-displays
Unfortunately, it appears to me that the price is over $100 US for it right now on most of the parts websites, instead of the $50 it was supposed to originally cost. Maybe you could find a better deal though.
Thanks for the tip.
I not sure if we can afford spending now, but may be in near future.