Hello all,

I have an ATI Radeon HD 3300 on-board video chipset, and an ATI Radeon HD 4350 PCI card. What I want is to have both displays available from one mouse/keyboard. I want to play media on one and have the other as my main desktop.

The problem is that with Xinerama enabled, KDE desktop effects do not work (KDE says XComposite and XDamage are not available, even though I explicitly enabled them as extensions in the xorg.conf file), and performance is quite bad. Without Xinerama enabled, performance is great, desktop effects work great, but there's a lot of trouble with full-screen video, and the KWin window manager does not apply in the second display (although I can run a second instance of KWin on :0.1).

I'd very much like to find a solution to this one way or another; any help would be much appreciated.

You've already essentially identified your options and their limitations. You can not use xinerama and maintain the composite and damage extensions. This is an issue for all video cards and all drivers.

You can use separate screens, but you may have to try a number of different options with different video players and different window managers to identify which works best for you at full-screen video. KDE4, unfortunately, does not properly support separate screens.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks adamk75,

At least I know now that I shouldn't waste my time with Xinerama.