teh said...

+In the old days (like 10 years ago), dual-head workstations were not exactly
+easy to put together.  If I remember right, one way was to buy Matrox cards
+and they'd supply the X server to go with them.
+
+What's the current situation?  I would like to put up dual head machines at
+counting stations.  I'd appreciate any advice, recommendations, howtos, etc.
+from the list.

Many of the drivers that come standard with XFree86
and Xorg support dual-head.  If te driver you need
doesn't, or if you need better support (such as
dual-head 3D) you can often get better drivers from
the hardware vendor.  (Or use multiple cards as
someone else noted, since the server core supports
this).

The Matrox 450 and 550 cards are OK, if not super
fast by today's standards.  We have used Nvidia and
ATI based cards as well as Matrox.  Those tend to be
trickier to set up than the Matrox, but are also a
lot faster.  Matrox may have faster dual head cards,
but if so we haven't tried them.  Matrox does have
a decent GUI to set things up, which I haven't seen
from Nvidia or ATI.  (Hopefully someone will point
me at them!)

[We switched from Matrox because we ran into problems
with OpenOffice crashing the server.  We wasted a lot
of time trying different configurations; eventually
we narrowed it down to something in either the card
or the driver.  Even with a single head we could crash
the X server.]