Hardware recognition in Linux can come a long, long way. And unless you have a computer that has proprietary hardware (meaning "Windows only" supported), it’s a good bet that if you try out a Linux distribution, everything in your computer box will be supported without issue.

Something that’s always bothered me – as will as many other *nix users – is the lack of multi-monitor support. It’s a pain to set up and even more of a pain to use if you want to use multi-monitor and Compiz (3D effects) at the same time.

I’ll put it to you this way: Let’s say you’ve got a fresh copy of Ubuntu or Linux Mint installed. You installed the Restricted Drivers set to support your nVidia video card. Then you attempt to set up a dual-monitor setup Xinerama style (so both monitors act as one). Chances are you’re not going to get very far by doing it strictly from the GUI. So then you have to manually edit the xorg.conf file but then find out you can’t use Compiz at all whereas before you could.

Is there anything you can do? Yes. You can use Envy. In many distros of Linux Envy is easy to find, download, install and use. If you run a debian-specific distro like Ubuntu or Linux Mint you can acquire it via apt-get, add/remove or software portal (the portal is Mint specific).

Envy adds in a GUI control manager that makes multi-monitor easy to set up that actually works – and gives you Xinerama style – and the ability to get all those cool 3D effects with Compiz too.

Is Envy perfect?

No, far from it. I have 2 major gripes with Envy.

1. It doesn’t tell you when you need to restart X save for one time. What happens is that you’ll modify a setting, exit the control manager and expect it to work. But it doesn’t – not until after a restart of X. I figured this out the hard way.
2. On some distros it will not ask for permission to write to the xorg.conf file. Fortunately you can copy/paste modifications in there, but still you have to know how to do that (i.e. sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, copy/paste/save, etc. etc.)

Even with these gripes, it’s still better than nothing. And even though I wasn’t completely able to escape the command line for the xorg.conf edit, it was darn close.

Soon enough I will be posting a video showing off what Envy can do now. It’s been a while since I used it last and it’s improved quite a bit (even with the gripes I have above).

So if you’re looking for a multi-monitor solution with Linux but can’t seem to get it to work, give Envy a try – it may work for you.