If you come here with a hand scratching your head, here are some quick items that sums up my solution, which may help you too.
Got another 23inch monitor (HP 2311f) to match with my current Acer G235H. Wish it gives me more fun. It turned out that I spend half day installing it up on my ubuntu. Indeed, this isn't the first time that I encountered this issue. But this time, I did learn something, which I thought would be good to share.
My environments are:
After connected this HP2311f to my graphic card's D-SUB, it was recognized however I want to use the HDMI cable just to see if it can give me better quality. But it doesn't work. I didn't want to get myself involved with linux graphic card set up, which was always a frustration. Then I decided to reinstall my Nvidia propriety driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-337.25.run. It's so because I managed to installed it before and assuming it should be fine this time.
As you expected, it didn't. I end up with
I have tried
None of them give me a peace.
Google with keywords: nvidia driver, update, freeze and high CPU, I got a lots of people within similar or same situation. There was one thing in common: no sound solution. I was forced to using my head instead of shooting blindly and in vain.
Looking into xorg's log, I narrow down that my problem might be xorg cannot read the EDID.
#handy for inspecting xorg log grep -E 'EE|WW' /var/log/Xorg.1.log | less
It was a reasonable conclusion after seeing a lot of message complaining not able to obtain EDID. It was also reasonable to assume that xorg process continuously read them and ended up taking too much CPU. One other thing I still don't understand is that it seemed keeping my old monitor's information because the log complaining about CRT-0, CRT-11) EDID which didn't exist. Sending me email: foalford@gmail.com if you know the reason.
Starting from this, I used get-edid and parse-edid to extract my two monitors EDID. It failed by stating that the header checksum invalid. I then turned to a windows XP with other tool: Monitor Asset Manager, which did the job. Before I transfer those extracted binary files, I found another awesome tool to accomplish this in linux, thanks to Creating and using edid.bin via xorg.conf
sudo X -verbose 6 > ~/xorg.log 2>&1 #Ctrl+C to interrupt it, which didn't work and I ended up with reboot. sudo nvidia-xconfig --extract-edids-from-file=~/xorg.log --extract--edids-output-file=~/edid.bin
Then I have got two files, edid.bin and edid.bin.0 corresponding to my two monitors. parse-edid was satisified with these two files.
With this progress, I find the Multihead is very helpful. in fact, I read this article before but only this time I understood it. After that, I end up with a working xorg.conf file2) like
Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0, DFP-1" Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:/etc/X11/hp2311-edid.bin" Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-1:/etc/X11/acer235-edid.bin" Option "IgnoredEDID" "false" Option "UseEDID" "true" Option "MetaModeOrientation" "DFP-1 LeftOf DFP-0" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Device0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 Option "Stereo" "0" Option "TwinView" "true" Option "SLI" "Off" Option "MultiGPU" "Off" Option "BaseMosaic" "off" SubSection "Display" Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection