4 Monitors

Full Size Image

Setup: 17" 1280x1024 (2 on far left and right),  22" 1680x1050 (vertical), 24" 1920x1080 (center).

The vertical monitor is on a hand-build stand made of 3/4" inch plywood (hand sawn - no power tools). Having a vertical monitor is amazing, especially for development. The difference it makes viewing code is phenomenal as it allows me to view 90 lines of code at once instead of 55.

The Struggle
Setting these monitors up was extremely difficult. But hopefully my endeavors can aid the rest of you, should you choose to increase your productivity by adding monitors.

Step 1. Don't buy an AMD graphics card. The cards are wonderful, the drivers are unbearable.
Step 2. Ok, so you bought an AMD card by accident, now what? The next step is to install the proprietary drivers. Twice. I first try to use 11.8 catalyst drivers, and then when they don't work I install the latest version.
Step 3. Now, you may notice some weird overlap between screens (only a few pixels), this can be fixed by editing your Xorg.conf file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf). Scroll down till you see "Section "Screen"", then change the "Virtual desktop" size and increase it as large as you need to.

Finally the tool that makes things work even when you're down, arandr (an XRandR GUI).

Well, that's about it, or at least the key points that helped me set up my multi monitors.
Note: Have another computer on hand just in case things go awry.