dual monitors xinerama What's the deal?
 

with the xinerama flag i have 8 double width displays
without it i have 2 completely seperate sets of 8 normal displays
Where are all the settings for both of these sets kept?

What i want is 8 displays over two monitors where i can assign each monitor to any one of the 8 displays. How can i do this?

i'm using a single nvidia card, without twinview, two crt monitors.

The settings are kept in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

I don't know what you mean by "normal displays" - if you refer to the four workspaces you get with each x-session, I don't think it will do what you want out of the box.

Xinerama gives you one big desktop... one x-session... one screen. You need to figure out how to get the effect you want with only one screen.

So...

I had 8 workspaces on one monitor. I add a second monitor... I would like to be able to access those same 8 workspaces but to be able to have #3 displayed on monitor 1, #6 on monitor 2...

I do know what xorg.conf is, what i'm after is all the configuration for the x-session for each screen.

When i added the second monitor, not using xinerama (because that sucks) It added a new kpanel and whatnot to the second monitor. Where are the settings for kpanel, desktops, etc... kept?

It is a text file which contains the configuration for the X server. Each screen is defined there and so on. Also look in the man pages.

If you search these forums of "xorg.conf" you will get many examples of diffeent working and broken configurations.

Basically you have a lot of reading to do :) S

You are probably thinking that the possibilities of dual head are horribly underutilised. You are right! We are being hampered by the fact that mostly windows users use dual head - and they only get one workspace anyway (they don't even know it is possible).

The settings for your windows manager are kept in your home directory.

You should realise that the different workspaces (available from the workspace switcher) are "virtual desktops" only. They are all open all the time.

It sounds like you are trying to do something the hard way though ... why not have n workspaces on one screen and 8-n on the other ... and use x2x to shift the focus. This way you open apps in whichever screen you like - sliding the mouse from one screen to the other at will. Isn't this more what you want?

You misread me there, i DO know what xorg.conf is.

The problem with having 8 workspaces for screen one, and 8 seperate ones for screen two is that if i want to display screen one, display 7 and screen one display 6 it can't be done.

to clarify

screen1.workspaces = [ s1w1, s1w2, s1w3 ..]
screen2.workspaces = [ s2w1, s2w2, s2w3 ..]

if i want to look at s1w1 and s1w2 simultaniously, i am out of luck

the configuration i would like is:
screen1.workspaces = [ s1w1, s1w2, s1w3 ..]
screen2.workspaces -> screen1.sorkspaces

Currently i am using x2x (i think), well, i have two seperate sets of workspaces and i am able to roll from one to the other using the mouse.

I assumed that the settings would be in the home directory, but after a quick search through .kde and most of the other .directories there i found nothing.

this might help
 

Just in case anybody else is looking for this, I have this working on a Compaq nc6220 laptop and have pasted up my xorg.conf with some notes: xorg.conf for xinerama on ubuntu dapper. It took a bit of fiddling and a lot of restarting X, but now it works like a dream.

Hope that's useful to somebody


christo

well, not exactly what i asked for
 

I just got a laptop with a 915gm, which uses the i810 driver so that'll probably come in handy

What do you do to switch between dual/single monitors? or does it just happen automatically if you launch X with no monitor attached?

well it _should_ just happen automatically, but I find at the moment that I have to comment out the dual-screen ServerLayout when I go mobile.. otherwise it just assumes the screen is plugged in and so most of the screen isn't visible.. I'm still looking for a fix for that, so let me know if you manage it..

christo

this is very unlikely to help you but nvidia twinview apparently disables screens that aren't plugged int...

meanwhile i broke my install completely trying to get my wifi card going. it works automatically with a newer version of ubuntu, but i had to go and downgrade...