Hey all, dual monitors on OSX anyone?

B

BriMister

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I've got a G4 400 with 608MB of RAM, lotsa hard drive space, and a Radeon card. I stole an old PCI Radius 8MB video card from one of my older macs and stuck it into my G4. Plugged in two monitors, and OSX only recognizes the Radeon. I know it sees the card because Apple system profiler recognizes that it's there, and OS 9.1 uses it just fine. Is this card doomed to live in the past, or is there a way to make it work with my system? Is there something special I have to do with OSX to make it see the card?

Any wise words would be helpful.

Thanks!

-Bri
 
The on-board ati graphics in my beige g3 and the pci rage orion (also ati chipset) work great in os X and OS9.

Have you tried removing the Radon card and just using the Radius with os X?

If it doesn't, don't even bother trying both. However, and I'm no expert on this, but with both cards in, you might try installing XF86 and configuring it for your Radius.

With my duel configuration, I can have XF86 on one monitor and aqua on the other (which is pretty darn nice).

I hope you figure this one out, please post anything you find.
 
There is probably 0% chance that you would ever find drivers that would make that card work with OSX. You need a newer ATI or nvidia card, I would recommend a GeForce 2 [not enough support for the GeForce 3 to warrant the price yet] as your primary display [if you have an AGP port that is, I think the G4 "Yikes!" didn't have AGP...] and an ATI Rage Pro for your secondary monitor. The rage pro is relatively cheap and games [the real video hogs] will only use your primary display, so it doesn't need to be a super card.
 
Well, in OS9, you could right click on an image and paste in as the icon for a folder [anyone know how to do this with OSX?]. On monitor #2 you can see part of my full albumns folder. They all have the albumn cover as the folder icon. The new finder doesn't like them very much though....performance really suffers when you've got a folder full of these :)
 
Changing icons works te same in OS X as it did in OS 9, except that only one get info window can be open at one time. Drive icons need to be hacked in order to be changed.
 
Well Here's my setup

Dual 450 G4
448Mb RAM
16 Mb ATI AGP w/ ADC connected to 15" Flat Panel
32Mb ATI RADEON PCI connected to SONY 19" E400

Works perfect in 9. On 40% of cold boots and 70% of warm boots (reboot) the RADEON will display this nasty grey mesh on the SONY. You have to do a hard reboot which just does nightmares on UNIX. So I then boot into Single User Mode (Command-S) and run fsck -y to repair the damage and attempt to boot again. Verbose booting (Command-V) doesn't alter it either. I've tried varying primary display setting, resolutions, and it still behaves like this.

Anyone seeing behavior like this?
 
Well Here's my setup

Dual 450 G4
448Mb RAM
16 Mb ATI AGP w/ ADC connected to 15" Flat Panel
32Mb ATI RADEON PCI connected to SONY 19" E400

Works perfect in 9. On 40% of cold boots and 70% of warm boots (reboot) the RADEON will display this nasty grey mesh on the SONY. You have to do a hard reboot which just does nightmares on UNIX. So I then boot into Single User Mode (Command-S) and run fsck -y to repair the damage and attempt to boot again. Verbose booting (Command-V) doesn't alter it either. I've tried varying primary display setting, resolutions, and it still behaves like this.

Anyone seeing behavior like this?
 
Matrix Agent:
I get my albumn covers off of the internet. In OS9, you could ctrl click on an image in IE and copy it. You could then paste it into the icon box of a folder. OSX will not let you do this. It works if you are copying and pasting icons from one folder to another [or from an icon program I would assume] but it won't take a JPG and turn it into an icon for you.
 
hmmm....strange......
does it work if you convert the file type?
Didn't even know that you could copy from IE
 
Dual monitors? Piece of cake.

I have a 666MHz G4 with a factory Radeon, and a PCI Rage Orion added. The main monitor, 21" Mitsubishi Diamond Pro, is on the Radeon, and looks gorgeous. The Orion drives my old Power Computing 17" monitor, which is shared on an Iogear MiniView USB KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switch with my old PowerCenter Pro and HP Vectra Windoze box.

Dual monitors work pretty much the way it did in OS9: you can assign separate resolutions and bit depths to each display, arrange them visually (in System Preferences > Displays rather than Control Panels > Monitors), create ColorSync profiles for each, etc.

The only difference I've noticed so far is that you can no longer apply seperate desktop pictures to each display. In the Finder's preferences, you pick a pickture, and it's applied to both monitors.
 
I think this was fixed in 10.1
Apparently have can set different pictures to be your background on different monitors. Bout time!
 
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