i was going through the recommended stuff from the wiki and got to the proprietary drivers part. i have a gtx 550 ti so i got the newest NVidia driver, but following the instructions from there i ran into some trouble. i have one monitor connected with dvi and one with vga. unsure if that makes a difference. when i try to do 'NVidia-settings' it returns something about the control display being undefined. i tried export display=:0. i tried putting in a bunch of things with the -c option. searched google for hours. xrandr -q returns 'can't open display' and i can't find any solution online. the monitors are a few years old. i can give more system information if it's needed. i tried manually editing my xorg.conf as per the wiki's instructions (to no avail), but NVidia-settings sure sounded like easy mode to me. if anyone could offer insight or a link to such a thing, I'd appreciate it.

Which distro, what wiki? Post your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

The error messages you get indidctae that the DISPLAY variable is not set. Try to set it manually. Note that Linux it is DISPLAY, not display, as you seem to have used display instead.

well, I posted this in the arch forum, so arch and arch-wiki. the xorg.conf is the generic one created by NVidia-xconfig. I haven't installed anything beyond the base package, so I don't really know how to copy my log and post it to the site from the terminal. I'm on a computer in the other room. yes, of course I used all caps for display. is DISPLAY supposed to be :0 or something else? I've tried all sorts of crap in the past 3 days.

edit: I don't know whether it's sarcasm or screwing with me or what, but I've had maybe 3 or 4 problems that I felt were enough to ask for help on the forums here, and in the end it was a few days' worth of people asking me remedial questions until I finally figured it out for myself. no sound advice or solutions or similar experiences. just crap like "oh display needs to be in all caps." pretty sure the guy who asked for my distro won't come up with any life-saving advice. I've had people ask the most retarded questions and thanked them for their input facetiously and had them actually tell me I'm welcome after I solved my own problem. that particular threat was called 'efibootmgr help' and the dummie suggested that I download efibootmgr.

Did you look at this https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/multihead

We can only give answers based on the information given to us. In your initial post you stated that you have exported display, not DISPLAY, so of course this is the first point to make (in fact, both error messages you describe indicate that it is still not set correctly or that your display server is not running). The more information you give us and the more accurate the information is the better we can help you.

As for asking which distro/wiki, this is something that can happen (and happened to me in the past) when you don't browse the forum by the different sub-fora, but use functions like "New Posts" instead.

just because a thread is started in a disto's forum, doesn't mean it is going to be the same as the distro giving trouble. There has been many threads started in the wrong forum. The same thing goes for wikis also.
Maybe just a typo, but here goes. export DISPLAY=:0.0