What does "-screen2" do? Is that something that firefox understands to mean "--display=:0.1"? I just wanted to be clear that my "-P Screen2" is simply the name of the profile.

Hi Quakeboy02. I though you knew what it did I started with your syntax, inserted my profile "yesterday" after -P (which did not until I added the quotes) then, as it did not launch in the second screen I put a "-" in front of screen2. Which then worked.

That said... I had closed all programs and noticed that Firestarter (firewall GUI) showed 3 connections still open. While investigating that I disconnected and reconnected eth0, logged out/in and finally rebooted. After the first boot attempt the machine did not come up - complained about a UUID it could not find. Rebooted again and was OK.

I read your latest post, removed -screen2 to see what would happen - could not launch the second instance of Firefox. Put back -screen2 and can still not launch the second instance

So I removed everything after -P and the launcher brings up the profile selector - but "yesterday" is loaded on my right screen even though the left launcher is told to run -P "default". I can launch the default profile on the right screen.

Although I just realized that I launched this instance of Firefox by clicking the link in the email from Linuxquestions.org notifying me of your last post. And it apparently launched the "yesterday" profile.

Hold that thought and I will see what home page this instance goes to. I had set a different one for yesterday.

Since it hadn't been posted, I thought it might be handy to show what arguments FF accepts when run from commandline. I for one had either not known about, or forgotten about, the --display argument, but I suspect (it *should*) act the same as giving "DISPLAY=<blah.blah> firefox .." however: "display" is not synonymous with "screen" -- as I think has been evinced earlier, DISPLAY=:0.0 and DISPLAY=:0.1 both refer to the same DISPLAY, but not to the same SCREEN.

I believe (and am not an expert on this) that the Window Manager can play an important role in how/where a given app gets placed when it starts, *provided* that enough of the following are true and cooperating:

1) the WM can properly identify the NAME of the app;
2) the app correctly supplies its NAME to the WM
3) the WM can do "smart" or "programmed" placement of apps/instances.
4) the app can be made to give itself a new name for a new instance.
5) the DISPLAY.SCREEN argument is both accepted by the app, passed to the WM, and honored by the WM.

I note that the OP seems to be using GNOME, so what I write next will probably be interpreted slightly differently by GNOME than it has for me:

For myself, historically, I used KDE and XFCE mostly, and this window/screen functionality tended to work much of the time, for the majority of apps. Currently, I've switched to i3 Window Manager, and the functionality of placing windows/apps usually works (though this WM is very new and is WIP) but the WM has problems particularly with Firefox windows and child-windows, because as I mentioned earlier, Firefox does not adhere properly to the EWM standards defining parent & child window naming (i.e. some windows are not even named until they are already rendered to the screen, making it too late for the WM to place them where you want them; and, mozilla/firefox uses almost as many different names as they do windows, and the scheme seems inconsistent, making it sometimes able to place *some* FF windows where you want, but not others).

Maybe not much help in that rambling, but I hope maybe it's interesting at the very least

Sasha

Yeah, I tend to use simplistic names, so the profile was named "Screen2". And as pointed out in the addition to my earlier post, "/usr/lib/firefox.3.5/firefox -P Screen2", is actually the "Properties->Command" value for a top-panel item on screen 2. To start it from a screen 1 terminal and explicitly direct it to run on screen 2, I would use:

My reply to Quakeboy02 continued...

Yes, I was in the "yesterday" profile. If I use the left launcher which says it loads the default profile on the left screen. Similarly the right launcher which says launches the yesterday profile on the right screen. Just what I wanted. The -screen2 apparently did nothing other than confuse things.

Sasha, Thanks for the concise summary of Firefox options. I am guilty of running gnome as you suspected. I used to run KDE back when gnome icons seemed to by much to big and the whole thing clunky. When I switched from the Red Hat/Fedora family to Ubuntu I found that gnome was acceptable and KDE had annoying issues such as not allowing a normal user to access an ntfs partition and making the initial install of all the stuff to play mp3 and video files a real pain compared to the way gnome Ubuntu did things.

Which brings up an XFCE question... With Nautilus I can create a shortcut to a remote server by SSH and it makes the connection automagically when I select it. Is there a way to do something similar in XFCE? I struggled with that some time back when I was trying to run Xubuntu on an old Pentium II PC. It worked but I could not make a connection to my server by any GUI tools.

Ken

p.s. Skaperen - not to ignore your input - I had not though of it but I can now login to 2 separate web mail accounts

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Hi Quakeboy02 - Here is a true story regarding simple variable names and such being mistaken for something else - occurred at a Fortune 250 company - as the IT security, infrastructure, systems integrator and DBA folks had not figured out a better way... When it was necessary to connect Visual Basic, MS Access, Crystal Reports and other apps to an Oracle or DB2 database where the user would not have a personal account it was necessary to pass the credentials from the application code. So a generic user account was created and the password set to "********". The idea being that if anyone got access to the source code or even looked at the .exe (literals are often not encrypted) they would think that the asterisks represented the masked characters they were used to seeing when they keyed in a password

I got involved with one of these and at least stored the credentials in a somewhat encrypted form in a file on a hidden share on an NT server. Got the IT police to buy off on it. The programmer hard coded the server and share name into a TEST version of the app. The client organization rolled out the TEST version to some 2000 PCs to beat the implementation date of a software QA program - The app would have had to meet a bunch of additional requirements after that date and would basically have been scrapped so the production version was never done.

About 2 years later the server was going off lease and things were being migrated to a new server and the old server # retired. Except that the app, which was well entrenched, required the original server # and hidden share. So "NT104" became immortal as the host of anything which needed a hard coded server number.

Ken

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I'll be totally honest: I have not created a single desktop icon, in any WM/DE, on any Linux installation I've used, since having switched to Linux 3+ years ago. Therefore, I can't help you here, but maybe someone else who has done this in XFCE, can help.

Sasha