Triple-head NVIDIA SLI on Linux with the proprietary “nvidia” driver

I recently bought a somewhat upgraded Chillblast Voodoo SLI (16GB/RAM, Intel i7 3770K overclocked to 4.7GHz, two GeForce 660 Tis in SLI; the thing’s a powerhouse!) and opted to upgrade my dual monitor configuration. I ended up purchasing three Asus VS247s and an appropriate stand. It’s pretty nice

I’ve spent quite some time digging up information on how to configure NVIDIA’s drivers to play nicely with SLI, though, likely because I use NVIDIA Surround under Windows 8 and have my displays connected up accordingly. On my first GPU I have two displays attached via DVI adapters, with one display connected via DVI to the second GPU. My solution was to avoid the nvidia-settings graphical interface altogether, since this appears to lack support for newer features within the driver. Instead, I used the following command to gather data about my display configuration:

$ nvidia-xconfig --query-gpu-info

Then used the output to formulate another to generate an updated xorg.conf:

$ sudo nvidia-xconfig --base-mosaic --metamodes="GPU-0.DFP-0: 1920x1080+1920+0, GPU-0.DFP-3: 1920x1080+3840+0, GPU-1.DFP-0: 1920x1080+0+0"

Upon restarting X (easiest to just reboot your machine!), my displays were configured correctly! The only issue I  did have was with identifying the positioning of the monitors; I had to jiggle the modes parameter a little before I got the numbering right.

Compiling SFLphone from source on Ubuntu 12.10

SFLphone is a nifty little SIP client that’s ideal for working with an Asterisk server. It’s lightweight, has few dependencies and has a very easy to use GUI, but unfortunately hasn’t been packaged very well (the current PPA stable build doesn’t run). To fix it, you’ll want to build it from source. The following should do it… (took a few minutes to crack)

Install the dependencies

sudo apt-get install \
	autoconf build-essential git libtool \
	gnome-doc-utils \
	libcommoncpp2-dev libdbus-1-dev \
	libccrtp-dev libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libsamplerate0-dev libzrtpcpp-dev libdbus-c++-dev libyaml-dev libpcre3-dev libgsm1-dev libspeex-dev libspeexdsp-dev libcelt-dev libexpat1-dev libnotify-dev libgtk2.0-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev

Clone the source code

git clone https://github.com/LukeCarrier/sflphone.git
cd sflphone

Compile pjproject

pushd daemon/libs/pjproject
# compiling without -fPIC causes the daemon build to fail with
# "could not read symbols" errors
export CFLAGS='-fPIC'
./configure --prefix=$HOME/Applications/SFLphone
unset CFLAGS
make dep
make
popd

Install the sflphoned daemon

pushd daemon
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=$HOME/Applications/SFLphone
make
make install
popd

Install the Gnome GUI

pushd gnome
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=$HOME/Applications/SFLphone
make
make install
# compile glib schemas gor gsettings
mkdir -p $HOME/Applications/SFLphone/share/glib-2.0/schemas
cp data/org.sflphone.SFLphone.gschema.xml $HOME/Applications/SFLphone/share/glib-2.0/schemas
glib-compile-schemas $HOME/Applications/SFLphone/share/glib-2.0/schemas
popd

Alter search paths for just this session

You’ll need to do this every time you want to run SFLphone. Stick it in a shellscript if you want to run it on start up!

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/Applications/SFLphone/bin
export XDG_DATA_DIRS=$XDG_DATA_DIRS:$HOME/Applications/SFLphone/share
exec dbus-launch $SHELL # dbus only reads config on launch

Run the application

sflphone-client-gnome