For context, I have an AMD graphics card trying to set up dual monitors since I’m migrating to Manjaro from Windows. Had good luck with Manjaro on my old spare laptop so I decided to make it my permanent choice for my gaming rig. Here’s the problem though. I have two 1080p monitors, and one of them is not showing up in displays and is listed as “disconnected”
[mayravixx@DERPATRON ~]$ xrandr
Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
DisplayPort-0 disconnected primary (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DisplayPort-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-A-0 connected 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 517mm x 323mm
1920x1080 60.00*+ 50.00 59.94
1680x1050 74.89 59.88
1280x1024 75.02 60.02
1440x900 59.90
1280x960 60.00
1366x768 59.79
1280x800 60.00
1280x720 60.00 50.00 59.94
1440x576 50.00
1024x768 75.03 70.07 60.00
1440x480 60.00 59.94
832x624 74.55
800x600 72.19 75.00 60.32 56.25
720x576 50.00
720x480 60.00 59.94
640x480 75.00 72.81 66.67 60.00 59.94
720x400 70.08
HDMI-A-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-D-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
Anyone know what’s going on or how I could fix it? I’ve been trying to find a solution for hours and haven’t come up with anything. HDMI-A-1 is the other monitor, the one being shown as disconnected by the way. Not using any adapters, just have 'em both plugged into my graphics card with basic HDMI cables.
also if you see that HDMI-A-1 and HDMI-A-0 have changed spots it’s because I tried swapping the cords to make sure it wasn’t a cord issue, to which I confirmed it was not a cord issue.
I do wanna mention video-linux is a thing that shows up, but I’ve already had to reinstall Manjaro a couple times because I kept removing it. When I do remove video-linux but keep video-vesa, I do get an odd error when I TTY and do startx. For some reason it gives me the error that it can’t start start it on a UEFI setup despite the fact that I’ve changed my bios settings to legacy only. I previously altered my BIOS settings to meet the needs of the Windows 11 insider preview builds, but as I had been having too many performance issues in OpenGL and missed the customization options of Linux, decided to switch back.
I’m kind of hoping you or someone else here will be able to resolve the problem, but in the case that it’s not possible (since I keep seeing other posts on the forums where people’s problems with dual monitors on Manjaro aren’t resolved) I’ll be more than happy to just wipe my drive free of Manjaro and set up an Arch install.
Update: I haven’t rebooted yet but something I wanted to point out. I keep seeing on the archwiki that for AMD devices I have to disable nomodeset, however when I loot at /etc/default/grub, I don’t see anything related to nomodeset, but browsing another post here on the forums, I noticed someone needed pci=realloc in their grub file. Just added it to mine in case, and doing sudo update-grub was kind of interesting. Specifically this was the output:
[mayravixx@DERPATRON ~]$ sudo update-grub
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found theme: /usr/share/grub/themes/manjaro/theme.txt
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-5.10-x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/amd-ucode.img /boot/initramfs-5.10-x86_64.img
Found initrd fallback image: /boot/initramfs-5.10-x86_64-fallback.img
Warning: os-prober will be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Its output will be used to detect bootable binaries on them and create new boot entries.
Adding boot menu entry for UEFI Firmware Settings ...
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+/memtest.bin
done
So I guess from what this said, it didn’t have a boot menu entry for UEFI firmware settings? Gonna reboot and edit this post if it either succeeds or fails.
Edit: Ended up getting the black screen with blinking cursor of death again. attempting to startx from tty once again mentions something about refusing to run on UEFI. Interestingly enough, it mentions that with vesa: connected to the statement. In the live environment now, about to reinstall Manjaro yet again.
Edit 2: Gonna see if it works better in the KDE version. I have the XFCE version right now, which has proven in the past to be a great choice, but I’ve also had just as much luck with KDE, so I’ll give that a try and see if maybe wayland would work better than xorg is.
So uh… I’ve been an idiot this entire time. Apparently it wasn’t a problem with Manjaro at all. My HDMI cord was just bad, in fact both of them were starting to go. Found an HDMI cord I had around that was brand new, never been used, and now both monitors work just fine.