# A newbie discovers how to make dual monitors work in FreeBSD13



## orhankur (Jul 26, 2021)

I've been using Linux since the early 1990s. When one of my Ubuntu 20.04 machines became "vacant" I decided to install FreeBSD13 on it. The installation went perfectly well except when I started X I found Xfce mirrored on my dual monitors. What is more, neither xrandr nor arandr could identify the monitors. I tried everything under the sun to expand the desktop on to the two monitors, to no avail.

The good folks at irc.libera.chat (#freebsd and #freebsd-desktop) came to my rescue. Following their advice I installed drm-kmod and added kld_list="i915kms" to /etc/rc.conf. After re-booting the machine I had what I wanted: both the VGA and the HDMI monitors came alive with an extended desktop. Using arandr I positioned the monitors to my liking and saved the configuration script in ~/.screenlayout; added the script to "Application Autostart" section in "Session and Startup"   of "Settings Manager." 
I'm posting this in the hope that FreeBSD newbies like myself would find it useful if they ever try a dual monitor installation.


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## Geezer (Jul 26, 2021)

It is all there in Xfce already.


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## orhankur (Jul 26, 2021)

In my case, without installing drm-kmod the display section showed only one monitor called "default". No other monitor was available to configure the desktop.


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## Geezer (Jul 27, 2021)

orhankur said:


> In my case, without installing drm-kmod the display section showed only one monitor called "default". No other monitor was available to configure the desktop.



Yes! Exactly.


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## scottro (Jul 27, 2021)

For me, using nvidia-settings, I was able to easily do it through a GUI. Yeah, shame on me, but but it was nice and easy, and every so often, a GUI tool is useful.


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## astyle (Jul 27, 2021)

@OP : graphics/drm-kmod should be installed pretty much by default if you want a graphical desktop like XFCE or KDE... The reason it's not in base.txz or sources.txz install sets is because it's a sizable package that tries to accommodate a wide range of GPU's, both integrated and discrete. If you don't install graphics/drm-kmod, you'll be limited to coloring your command line output in all colors of the rainbow.  For that, look for posts by vermaden in the "Blogs and Newsfeeds" section of these forums, it's surprisingly interesting.


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## SirDice (Jul 27, 2021)

astyle said:


> The reason it's not in base.txz or sources.txz install sets is because it's a sizable package that tries to accommodate a wide range of GPU's, both integrated and discrete.


If it was part of the base OS it would have to be updated through a system update. As a port it's much easier to provide frequent updates to it.


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## vermaden (Jul 27, 2021)

astyle said:


> @OP : graphics/drm-kmod should be installed pretty much by default if you want a graphical desktop like XFCE or KDE... The reason it's not in base.txz or sources.txz install sets is because it's a sizable package that tries to accommodate a wide range of GPU's, both integrated and discrete. If you don't install graphics/drm-kmod, you'll be limited to coloring your command line output in all colors of the rainbow.  For that, look for posts by vermaden in the "Blogs and Newsfeeds" section of these forums, it's surprisingly interesting.


Thanks - just one note ... some of the 'posts' in the 'Blogs and Newsfeeds' may be out of date because often when I get feedback from people about the topic I wrote about I fix/modify the blog posts on my https://vermaden.wordpress.com/ blog. It may just have more accurate and up to date information.

Regards.


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