Getting KDE4 (and Slack13.37 in general ) to do what I want....
 

I have a Radeon 5970 with primary monitor connected to it, and a Radeon 4xxx onboard chipset with secondary monitor connected to it.

Xinerma (sp?) is enabled, giving me one desktop across both monitors.

1) (resolved) Could not get flash to work, no matter where I put plugin. Interesting enough, I used SBOPKG to install flash, and now it works. Go figure? Kudos to SBOPKG!

2) "Dekstop effects are not available on this system due to the following techinical issues: Required X extensins (XComposite and XDamage) are not avaiable." How do I make them available, or otherwise enabled? IOW, how do I make desktop effects available?

3) KDE3 let me add a Terminal Sessions menu entry. Options included root shell, and root midnight commander. How do I add these to the menu in KDE4?

4) KRDC performance. It's a pig. I'm currently using the Windows tightVNC vncviewer.exe via wine because I get better performance. Are there better viewers that anyone would recommend?

5) Keyboard - Shift-Up Arrow selects stuff as the arrow key moves the cursor around. Shift-<numpad Up Arrow) does not - I'm not sure how to change keyboard config to allow this.

I'm still playing with number two, not sure about 3-5. Help appreciated.

You can not use desktop effects across multiple radeon video cards. Xinerama automatically disables compositing.

Adam

I found that. Is there an alternative? Isn't twinview nVidia only?

Oh, and is Xinerama disabled if I use a single radeon card with two monitors connected to it? I'm guessing yes because behind the scenes it sees it as two video cards.

Twinview is nvidia only but twinview still only deals with a single video card. And if you have xinerama across multiple nvidia cards, composite will still be disabled.

If you use a single radeon GPU with two monitors, you can have desktop effects as long as you don't use xinerama. You can create a single screen across both monitors (when using a single GPU) by using xrandr. 3D and composite will both work.

Adam

1) you should put it under /usr/lib/firefox/plugins or /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

2) you should have those packages installed (it's on /x directory) and make sure you have installed a binary driver from your VGA vendor (ATI/NVidia)

4) Slackware has tightvnc on /extra too

Thank you!

I put the plugins where you said, still did not work. SBOPKG must have done something more than just move the plugins there - or maybe the one you get from flash doesn't work?

I could not get chrome to run - installed, but nothing happened. Used the SBOPKG version, still won't run <shrug>

Gave up on desktop eye candy. Could not get displays to do what I want without xinerama and without corrupting one or the other display, or better yet, locking the display so that I had to ssh into the box from another computer just to reboot it. I suspect ATI drivers just aren't that stable (this is a surprise how?), but don't really have time or the desire to pursue this.

Found tightvnc in /extra, installed, works very well. Very nice. Still trying out how to configure keyboard, and how to add terminal options to menu. Need to look closer at KDE3 and see how it is done there, the option to add them doesn't seem to exist in KDE4, or if it does I've not found where it has been moved to.

If you want to drive both monitors from a single GPU, this will work with either the open source drivers or fglrx with xrandr. I've done this on multiple AMD HD video cards without any stability problems. If you would like help doing that, just ask.

Adam

I would indeed like help doing that. I have an ATI 5970, and I have plugged a monitor into each of the outputs on the back of the card. With xinerama enabled, I get a nice wide desktop and I can drag windows from monitor to monitor.

I'm using the AMD proprietary drivers. Would I be better off with the open source driver? The proprietary drivers seem to be sluggish: moving windows around the desktop, for example, is almost painful, scrolling in a browser is at a snail pace.

How is this done without xinerama?

check about : plugins (no space to avoid being converted to emoticons) in Firefox and see if it's there. When you see it, then it has been installed and ready to be used.

try running it from console. I guess you must give permission 777 to /dev/shm (shared memory) and then it will work

PS: I added Option MigrationHeuristic greedy to the Device section in xorg.conf, and desktop performance is much improved. Remarkable difference.

Got Chrome working. Apparently the install from Google and SBOPKG are missing a few dependencies. I installed GConf, ORBit2, the mozilla nss library, and then had to chmod 4755 chrome-sandbox. After I did all of that, Chrome now works. And Flash works with it!

Show us your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log files.

Adam

I got it working without xinerama. I ended up running both monitors off of the same video card, and had to manually set resolution in xorg.conf. Works beautifully now :)

Also, a half dozen libraries are not where Chrome expects them to be. You have to set some symbolic links in addition to installing gconf, orbit2, and the mozilla nss library. Not even SBOPKG got this one right, I had to do all of this manually. Well, actually, SBOPKG installed gconf and obrit2 quite nicely, and I used the mozilla nss libs from slackbuilds <whew>....

It was stated that you need seamonkey-solibs installed in SlackBuilds website :)