At work we ordered a Inspiron 530S as an upgrade to my previous machine. Dell tech support stated that the system would be able to support dual monitors with an extended desktop.

Here’s what happened:
Once the Inspiron arrived, we purchased a PCI Nvidia 5500 GeForce MX card. This NVidia card overpowered the ATI Radeon 2400 Pro due to a setting in the bios that gives preference to PCI over PCIe. So in short, I could never get both video cards to play together. Once I removed the NVidia card from my computer, the ATI Radeon 2400 started functioning properly for the first time. (Dell Tech Support took over my computer and they couldn’t figure out why).

Next, talked to Dell Tech Support on the phone. Their sales rep claimed that a DVI Splitter cable would support dual monitors with extended desktop. We ordered two of them. There is no setting on the ATI drivers to support a DVI Splitter cable with extended desktop. Don’t have faith in Dell Sales Reps. Do your homework before you purchase something from them.

After this failed, I noticed a black cap on a VGA port. I took it off and tried plugging in my second monitor into it and rebooted. At start up an warning message displayed stating that my video card configuration wasn’t supported and I had to press F1 to continue. I continued. The integraded graphics card on the motherboard took control over my PCIe ATI Radeon 2400. I couldn’t even get the PCIe card to show up in device manager.

I talked to a senior tech support over at dell, let’s call him, Rasheem, and after dissecting what he was saying, he stated that the only way to get dual monitors with extended desktop was to purchase a video card with a DMS-59 connector. This DMS-59 connector outputs two DVI outputs to a dongle which you can connect two DVI cables to, to support two monitors. Some even support up to four monitors.

Solution:
Purchased an ATI Radeon X1300 PCIe card that comes with a dongle for $125.

Shoot me an email if you come up with a better solution or if this saved you a few hours.

When attempting to load external compiled css swfs that have an embedded font into my flex application I was getting this error: Unable to load style(SWF is not a loadable module). This is reported as an official bug on adobe’s site at: Enable Local App to load RunTime CSS.swf from Server

To solve this, you require two things.

1. Crossdomain Policy


2. Local Apache Web Server

Regardless if this is a bug, the host server still needs a crossdomain policy at the root of the domain. Here’s an example crossdomain.xml policy.

The next problem is that you cannot load external compiled swfs from a
document root (c:/my documents/flex projects/myProject/myProject.html) until the bug is fixed.

PC Users:
What I did is installed easyphp. Next, I set up an alias in easyphp. Right click on the ‘easyphp’ icon in the taskbar -> administration. I set the alias to my bin folder of my project so that when I access the url http://127.0.0.1/myProject/myProject.html it loads up my bin directory. Also in my debug settings in flex I set the default debug and run path to launch as http://127.0.0.1/myProject/myProject.html.

Now my css/style swfs are loading great remotely. The only downside is having to run easyphp on top of everything just to load in my external compiled font swfs.

Mac Users:
Thanks to Bryce Barrand

• go to system preferences


• click on sharing


• click on “web sharing” (this will turn on the automatically installed version of apache)


• edit apache’s httpd.conf file (should be found at disk/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf)


• Find the line that says /Directory>
  
• Just after that, add an Alias for each project that you want to test such as this:

  Alias /nameOfAlias /pathToYourFlexBinFolder

• Set your directory node attribute to ”/pathToYourFlexBinFolder”. Set the directory node value to:
  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
  AllowOverride None
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
  
• Restart the webserver by unchecking and rechecking the “web sharing” checkbox

should be good to go after this. you can see the results by going to http://localhost/nameOfAlias in your browser