Here is some more information that suggests that the nouveau driver is probably swapping/mis-labelling the two video streams that the card produces. The NVS-290 video card has a DMS-59 connector. That is attached to a short DMS-59 to Dual VGA cable. The VGA connectors are labeled 1 and 2. At boot time, before the nouveau driver is involved, the boot text is output on the connector labeled "1", which is connected to my left-hand monitor (as god intended -- he told me so last night). Once I get logged into Gnome, with the X server (with XRandR extension) and the nouveau driver in the loop, it turns out that pixels on the virtual screen that are sent to output "DVI-I-1" come out of the VGA connector labeled "2", and vice versa ("DVI-I-2 comes out connector #1). For the record, all of the gear came from Dell, associated with a T3400. So the possibilities seem to be: 1) The DMS59-VGA cable is mislablelled w.r.t. the DMS-59 connector. 2) The nouveau driver is mislabeling output streams #1 and #2 3) For some reason, "the right thing" is for XRandR output DVI-I-1 to go To DMS-59 output #2, and vice versa. Of the 3, my suspicion is with #2, i.e. the nouveau driver. Just to be sure, I'll try to buzz out a sample pin on the cable later tonight. Hmmm, I guess I should also try my DMS-59 to dual DVI-I cable and see how that works. -- Charlie

On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 18:02:12 -0400 Charles Butterfield wrote: Completely wild guess here, but gdm is running as the user "gdm". Perhaps a script in the /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ that checks to see if the user is gdm and runs xrandr? (Somehow I have this feeling that gdm X startup might not go through all the same channels as a normal user X startup though).