First thing, it does work. I say that because it was touch and go for a while. It took 12 hrs to get this working, so get some coffee and plan to be really persistent before you even think about it.
Second - It could go super easy, but it might not. So back up your xorg.conf before you start. I know that would stupid to say - because I didn't! I'm all in but you might want to think twice about it.
My goal was to get my Quad running 8.04 with 4GB ram running dual monitors - Viewsonic widescreens.
If you are going to try this make sure you follow the directions that fit your hardware and distro. I saw a lot stuff about compiling everything, and that was old and not needed.
I got the card, put it in and tried to boot up. I got a nice black screen, so it didn't start off well. I was on 8.04 at the time. I tried installed the nVidia drivers via ssh and followed the instructions, but it just wasn't working. After a few hours, I gave up and did an upgrade to 8.10. That took a couple of hours but went smooth.
Then I did the reboot and up came failsafe mode or 640x480. This time I could follow the normal 8.10 directions. Go to hardware drivers and select the proprietary nVidia driver 177 I think was recommended and I took that one. I restarted X but still 640x480. I rebooted :) still 640x480. :(
I ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg a few times with and without -phigh. Don't do this, that will never work. I found that it drops a vanilla xorg.conf onto your machine and doesn't specify the driver as nvidia with the a bus entry - you don't need to know this if you don't do it. If you did do it, go back to the version that was installed with the proprietary drivers.
I went into xorg.conf and deleted all the lines that set the resolution to 640x480 and restarted X (ctrl-alt-backspace). Wham it worked. It restarted with one monitor in 1680x1050. Then I had to open nvidia-settings.
Do this from the command line as sudo or you can't rewrite the xorg.conf file.
Once I did that twice, I was able to just select the second monitor to activate it and it defaulted to 1680x1050. I hit save and was a afraid to touch it anymore.
First impression is the card was great, X performed so well, I was surprise. As good as using my MacBook and a second screen.
Couple of things I still need to do:
1. Turn on Compiz and see how it goes.
2. My background was stretched across both monitors and I don't like that.
3. I think I need to fix my Xvnc, that seemed to stop working.
4. Onc LCD shows as a CRT. I think that is affecting the brightness. Not sure why that's wrong.
On the plus side, I'm not using the IBM on-board graphics card anymore and that freed up an mtrr which you only get 8 of and I kept getting warnings about being out. Then I only had 1M uncachable entry. It didn't solve my memory problems, but its an improved situation.
Looks cool too.
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