Figure 4: UltraSharp monitor support on stand on left and on wood frame
on right.
Figure 5: The left picture shows the underlying wood stand while the
right picture shows the completed display from a side view.
We recommend angling the left and right columns of displays inward for better visibility. This can be done by constructing separate stands for each column. Figure 5a shows how we did this on our much larger LCD array.
Figure 5a: Separate stands for each column enable curving the display
around the user for better visibility of the sides.
In order to run the 0.01 Gigapixel display we used a Dell Optiplex
GX270 PC which runs at 2.66 GHz and has 2 Gigabytes of RAM. The
Optiplex came preinstalled with a digital graphics card (Nvidia GeForce
5200 FX) that has a splitter (black connector that plugs into the top
card [the only non-blue one] in figure6) that uses the AGP bus. In
order to use 7 more monitors we installed 4 dual-head graphics cards
(all Nvidia Geforce 5200 FXs) in the four PCI slots.
Figure 6: Shows the cables that come of the back of the PC that plug
into the five graphics cards.
The Optiplex is a dual-boot machine that has Windows XP and Fedora Core
1 Linux (from RedHat). The Windows operating system, detected all the
graphics cards automatically and all 9 monitors. We were able to
easily configure all nine monitors in less than five minutes using the
GUI provided by Windows (see figure 7). UltraMon is a handy software
utility to help manage multi-screen layouts.
Figure 7: A screenshot of the GUI provided by Windows to easily
configure monitors.
Linux also automatically detected all the graphics cards and all 9
monitors. However, Linux was not nearly so friendly when configuring
the monitors. RedHat currently has a tool that automatically sets up
two monitors side-by-side, but not anything beyond that. As a result we
had to learn how to change the XF86Config file by hand. The XF86Config
file is the file responsible for configuring external devices (such as
mice, keyboards, graphics cards, and monitors) for the graphical X
Server used in Linux. The config file can usually be found in the
/etc/X11/ directory. For more information on the XF86Config file see
the XFree86 website at http://www.xfree86.org.
We were unable to find any examples of how to configure more than three
monitors in Linux. As a result it took us over 7 hours to configure
our nine monitors correctly in Linux. Our XF86Config
file can be found here
as a reference (the file was renamed to "XF86Config.txt" to help some browsers. It should just be "XF86Config" - no extension).
The final result is shown in figure 8. The two developers of the 0.01
Gigapixel display are: Robert (Bob) Ball (left) and Dr. Chris North
(right).