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KDE Multi-Monitor Control Getting An Overhaul
Multi-monitor support on Free systems has always been a pain (even after RANDR made it a lot less of a pain). GNOME2 had a great feature: you only had to configure a given pair of displays once and it would do-the-right-thing and remember their configuration. But if you wanted to mirror displays of different resolutions, you were out of luck. KDE handled the latter case, but infuriatingly enough doesn't remember or restore configurations like GNOME2 did, and worse yet requires manual intervention before disconnecting a display. But, now that's all changing: "As some of you might have noticed, display management in KDE is not really something we could be proud of. It does not work as expected, it lacks some features and it’s not really maintained. Time to change it, don’t you think? ... Alex has written the libkscreen library that provides information about available/connected/enabled outputs and notifications about their changes. He also intends to write a KDED daemon that would listen for these events and depending on connected monitors (every monitor can be uniquely identified by it’s EDID) it would load specific configuration. For example, docking your notebook into a docking station at work would automatically turn on a second monitor and place it left of the notebook screen (or whatever you configure the first time you do it). Undocking the notebook and connecting a data projector in a meeting room would automatically set clone mode etc. etc."
Additionally, the dock applet and monitor configuration UI have been overhauled allowing for quickly setting common configurations ("extend display to the {right,left,top,bottom}" / "clone") directly from the desktop, and direct manipulation of the monitor positions if you do end up needing to use the configuration program (article has a video and screenshots).
In other news, readers demand to know when Slashdot is getting getting an editor.
You're supposed to know how to hack your xconfig with vi. Setting up two displays is supposed to hurt.
:wq
I'd like to see more vanilla versions of this software. Open Source Software has become almost as bad as the commercial counter parts in wanting to wrap everything up as one big GUI package. I don't want a bunch of bologna to download and run to configure dual monitors if I want to use a very lightweight window manager, or setup an embedded solution such as a kiosk.
/optional/ GUI front end over this junk any day.
One of the original and cool ideas of open source was to allow hackers to dive into the utilities and do really cool things with them that they aren't meant to achieve. A multi monitor control system that is tied into a blob of libraries doesn't sound appealing to me. I'll take a 32KB application that has an
Sig: I stole this sig.
And here Windows 7 handles five monitors using three different resolutions flawlessly. Thanks to Ultramon, they line up seamlessly in spite of also being different sizes and being at different physical elevations. It's one of the more major things that has kept me on Windows - I look forward to Linux being able to do the same.
Windows XP did multi-monitors fairly well. Windows 7 handles it excellently. I have five monitors and when replacing one of the video cards, I changed which monitors were plugged into which card. As soon as Windows 7 booted, it automatically corrected for switching the cables around so that the monitors were all exactly as they were when I powered down the system in spite of every monitor being plugged into a different card and port.
Not to say Win7 isn't lacking some features, but nothing free or cheap software like Ultramon doesn't fix (IE: fine-tuning relative positions, multi-monitor wallpaper, taskbar across all monitors), but the essential parts of multi-monitors are handled very well.
They waste all these time mucking with icons, reorganizing menu accesses, and other such superfluous "human interaction" nonsense, but never got around to supporting something as basic as multiple displays.
It's why you're better off to wait for jesus to return than the mythical "year of linux desktop".
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
nvidia-settings
Detect Displays
Click on newly-detected display and select "TwinView" and "Clone Displays".
Click apply.
Done, works with all window managers.
I was confused by the whole "refuses to remember or restore configurations" thing. WTF? This is 2012. EVERYONE has multiple monitors. How is it in any way acceptable that the OS refuses to remember your monitor config?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Windows XP did multi-monitors fairly well. Windows 7 handles it excellently. I have five monitors and when replacing one of the video cards, I changed which monitors were plugged into which card. As soon as Windows 7 booted, it automatically corrected for switching the cables around so that the monitors were all exactly as they were when I powered down the system in spite of every monitor being plugged into a different card and port.
Not to say Win7 isn't lacking some features, but nothing free or cheap software like Ultramon doesn't fix (IE: fine-tuning relative positions, multi-monitor wallpaper, taskbar across all monitors), but the essential parts of multi-monitors are handled very well.
How well Windows supported it was largely up to how well the video card drivers supported it. Some systems required rebooting in order to get it to recognize the additional monitor; others would work without a problem. It was typically consistent for any given driver, but very hit-and-miss between video cards/driver versions.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
And it still puts the menu for every window at the top of one monitor... often a long distance from the window itself.
Why don't they fix this? Now that Steve has gone, can we challenge some of his idiosyncrasies?
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
While is nice to have better control over this features we need to first get them working reliably, I still can't get KDE to start with max the laptop monitor max resolution, it will always go back to a 1280x768 and I have to change it manually.
In the end we get back to the same old problem with Linux graphics, driver support. I remember back a couple of years having a nvidia card with the binary blob, most stuff worked as I wanted but screen adjusting and multimonitor had to be done via nvidia tools, but in the end of the day it works. Now I have an ATI card and I cannot get multimonitor working properly even with its own tools, on a more powerful card with more memory.
For quite a while I think there has been no real interest on doing this overhaul as most of those features would not work releably on most systems.
C-x C-c
I know your pain, I feel it too when moving my laptop around between meetings and my desk frequently. Can't use Gnome any more, fluxbox is of course awesome but sometimes a little too minimal. KDE is great, except for this multi-monitor config issue. Sorry someone modded this 'flamebait' (seriously?)
In all these years of Linux usage I still have not been able to do clone a display while having different resolutions. Is this actually possible?
I want to present slides on a presentation monitor, which is connected to my Thinkpad (nvidia, binary driver) via VGA cable. At the same time, I want to see the slides on the notebook screen during the presentation. So the screen has to be cloned.
However, the native resolution of the notebook and second (big) monitor differs. For instance, the notebook is 1600x900, the external presentation monitor is 1920x1080. Is there a way to produce the signal in 1920x1080 on the second monitor, and at the same time clone the screen on the notebook screen in another resolution?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
I don't understand. When I plug in an extra monitor on my Fedora with KDE it is automatically recognised and configured, even when the monitors are different resolutions. All I have to do is to choose to extend my desktop onto it and chase up wallpaper for it.
Of course unplugging a monitor without first moving all windows defaults away from it can cause problems that can be hard to resolve. Yeah, I begin to see the problem, but this certainly isn't just a KDE issue.I remember the same problems with another much more popular and rather less gracious OS back when I used to use Microsoft's offering.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
It's not that the monitor isn't detected and used by default, it's that it forgets the setting you specified the last time you had that monitor plugged in. Further more, the 'Multiple Display' setting item always says it doesn't detect that you are using multiple displays, even when they are listed in the monitor arrangement window. KDM also sometimes shows it's login window half on one monitor half on the other.
Also also, if your monitors arent' the same size, a small window that appears on the smaller monitor can be off the screen because the virtual desktop is rectangular and you have no way of moving it apart from the right click menu on the toolbar - not the end of the world but very annoying all the same, just as all these quirks are