Video Card

You have a lot of options here. Basically, you either need to have some video card that supports composite or svideo out, or you need a television that supports VGA input. I chose to go with the cheap TV route and a NVidia graphics card with SVideo out support. I find that NVidia produces some very nice binary drivers for Linux that are very easy to configure. I have my card configured to use the monitor and the TV to produce one unified desktop. The monitor is the left half and the TV is the right half. Here is a screenshot.

Using this scheme makes it very easy to script existing applications to work the wway you want and eliminates the need for you to write and maintain lots of extra code. This.. is the beauty of open source. Standing on the shoulders of others, and having someone else, in turn, stand on yours.