[Solved] Setting up dual monitor + laptop screen on Alienware M17xR4

Hi everyone,
My apologies in advance if this has been asked before, I was not able to find any relevant information for this anywhere. I have Alienware M17xR4 with nvidia GTX660M graphics card. I also two extra 24" Asus VS248 monitors besides my laptop screen. They are connected via HDMI and DisplayPort (DVI on the monitor) and I want to have all 3 displays working, if that is not possible, then two monitors working side-by-side.
The problem is that I have not been to able to work the two monitors so far, I did at one point managed to make one big screen out of these two monitors but I want a Windows-like behaviour wherein I can drag the two windows between two screens and maximise them on individual monitors. Right now I have completely messed up my display in such a manner that the TTY1 gets stuck on the boot while trying to start the login manager. I can however boot through TTY2 (ALT+F2) and change any configuration.
I have tried deleting xorg.conf and then regenerating it via nvidia-conf but that doesn't help either.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Last edited by babbupandey (2015-06-05 05:47:01)

Hello i think i may be able to help with your problem, i had a similar one
I have an alienware m14xr2 and i also tried to do the same but i noticed when using the nvidia card with the nvidia drivers i had a problem, i assume that the external display is connected to the intel card, as it worked perfectly with the intel only driver setup. To fix this issue I use bumblebee, the nvidia optimus alternative for Linux which uses the intel card as primary, allowing me to use both external and internal displays in extended mode, and run what i need on the nvidia card and pull it over with a virtualgl bridge, i even seam to get a performance increase with bumblebee over the regular nvidia drivers running all the time (only when using primus).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/bumblebee 
Here is a link to the bumblebee page i used, though i had problems setting up that i found many alienware users had that can be fixed in the troubleshooting area bellow "[ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU: No devices detected"
I noted many alienware uses had this problem in my search.
Also the package arandr is an xrandr front end may help in the initial setup as i had problems using the display config built into cinnamon to do this.
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/comm … ny/arandr/
Now hopefully this makes at least dual screen working, i use dual with hdmi, and the vga should work ok for your third screen, but im not sure about the display port, never tried it and i believe it is on the Nvidia card, but there are instructions on the wiki page above you may be able to use about multiple monitors when the output is on the other card that may help, again try the vga first works on mine.
As for fixing your current xorg issues, i also did a thing in my attempts to get a working situation and eventually gave up, in the end reinstalled arch and followed the wiki and it worked, but mabye try removing all of x org and your display environment and re-install as per the bumblebee wiki.
i hope this helps you get multiple monitors, i know how amassing they are to use

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