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I remember people I knew wanting the Matrox because it was possible to have duel screen on Linux. They usually had a huge grin on LAN parties, once they got their breath back from carrying two heavy CRT monitors and a PC tower. Good times.

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Maybe I misunderstood something at the time, but the mga X11 driver was weird. My understanding, at least at the time, is that it is/was possible to provide an X11 driver that would work regardless of the underlying operating system, providing features such as dual-head support.

This feels intuitively wrong to me now and I doubt that's how it worked. In any case I dutifully copies the Matrox provided X11 driver to OpenBSD and enjoyed multi-monitor support.

There was nothing underlying X servers until about 2010. The X server was the lowest layer.

Looking at a few old mailinglists agrees with you. Apparently the mga_drv and mga_hal_drv could just be copied to any system running XFree86, at least Linux and the BSDs, and would let you utilize dual-head support.

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