04.18.2014 (Kittan) Friday is officially Cheeseburger day around here.

Also it took a day longer than it should have but we finally this afternoon got the multihead stuff to work. I fiddled with some older drivers last night, and Novak came in today with some ideas to stack on top of it and by about 1PM we had screens showing up on multiple GPUs. Stupid XRandR is mandatory in newer versions of the FireMV driver from ATI, and it also hoses up multi-GPU, so we had to use a driver from 2009 where it was still disablable. After ironing out some modeline info in xorg.conf we got up to 8 screens running beautifully before stopping for the day's cheeseburgers.

(Machine as it was at cheeseburger time)

That's the GLMatrix screensaver running, which has some decent 3D effects. It actually ran a lot smoother than I was expecting. Looked pretty smexy. After cheeseburgers I cleaned some more shopspace and shifted the whole assembly over to a different table, so I can free up that temporary worktable space to build the frame. Probably I'll start on that tomorrow.
I went ahead and hooked up all 12 screens and piecewise got them enabled in the system, checking alignments and modeline stuff as I went, and left plenty of notes for Novak when he comes in. Unfortunately the GLMatrix screen saver crapped itself past 8 screens, so I had to use a cheesier 2D one for further testing.

So here's the monitor arrangement as it is now. That's approximately the final layout. When I build the frame some things are going to shift a bit, vertically horizontally or both, but that's basically what we'll be looking at. The two blank screens on the left there decided to develop backlight issues, which is unfortunate and I'll have to slap them around a bit.

Also in the back corner there you can see my workbench with its array of 8 22" screens, one of which is displaying the Hackaday Sci-Fi contest entry page. The other corner has Novak's workbench with his array of four custom-built 17" 1920x1200 screens. Apparently we like screens around here.