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New KScreen Supplies Some Magic For Multi-Monitor Linux Set-Ups
An anonymous reader points out developer Àlex Fiestas's work on multiple monitor configuration for Linux. In particular, the screen manager that he and Dan Vrátil are working on — KScreen — gives KDE users a utility "making the configuration of monitors either auto-magical or super simple." This is one thing that's certainly gotten much better in recent years for Linux GUI users in general, but the video in the linked post makes me a little envious — another good reason to swap desktops once in a while.
The first time I ran X on my home computer, I had to call Diamond to get the timings for my SpeedStar card so I could calculate the correct values to put in my xconfig file. And the person who answered the phone knew exactly what I needed, flipped thru a binder, and read off the numbers.
Until it's put into a distro.
Jesus, stop acting like a jackass.
A suggestion to the developers. Please allow for degenerate cases. I deal with a set of old, specialized, practically irreplaceable displays that cannot produce DPMS data. In the past I've suffered with embedded displays that produce completely inaccurate DPMS data.
Allow the operator a means to manually override whatever display parameters your software obtains (probably via xrandr) from the operating system. The display parameters are often bogus and must be corrected.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Basically..
* it will remember what you configuration was used with that monitor
* when you close your laptop it will go to the native resolution of the attached screen
I don't even know how new those are, but I've never personally used (or noticed) either of them before...
Everything else, I've been using succesfully since I started using laptops on both Windows and Linux.
Actually, no, you could not.
You didn't (and still don't) even have a separation between window manager and applications, so hung application produces pretty patterns on the screen when you try to drag your window, if you can even drag it at all. You didn't (and still don't) have usable multiple-desktop or multiple-viewports support, so changes in resolution only affect one giant constantly-displayed area, with all windows mapped to it. You can't allocate a monitor connected to one host to become a part of the environment for other hosts, or combine multiple hosts with their monitors to show a single desktop, with applications spanning all of them.
So you are comparing the ability to change the resolution on the fly without restarting applications (what Windows had before Linux got it in 2001, and became part of mainstream in 2007) against actual usable management of resolutions on multiple screens, some virtual, some networked. And no, your stupid Terminal Services don't count.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
This shows that people like you have last used Windows back in the XP or even ME days. Get with the times instead of wallowing in outdated criticisms.
Now the effect is masked by the speed of processors and programmers carefully starting tens of threads for their UI, but it's still there (window won't even move if anything gets blocked). Meanwhile, X applications may run on some remote m68k, and won't slow down the rest of UI.
This is soooooo useful to so many desktop users
Workstations users need that all the time, they just can't get it from Windows.
compared to the use case of extending desktop to another monitor on the desk without fiddling with multiple config files and utilities. *snicker*
Do you even understand what this is about? All this IS IMPLEMENTED in nice UI, the article is about a new KDE utility for it.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The article says: "This is one thing that's certainly gotten much better in recent years for Linux GUI users in general..." -- I cannot agree. While connecting a beamer to a notebook is simpler today, support for multiple monitors (of a desktop machine) is far from where it was some years ago. For years I had been able to disable the (default) Xinerama options, so I could have two separate instances of (e.g. KDE 3) running on both screens. That allowed me for example to stay on virtual desktop 1 on the left monitor and cycle through my virtual desktops on the right monitor. (Imagine lots of data sources on the right screen and some application I use to combine stuff on the left monitor; I want to switch desktops without the left monitor changing its content). This is still possible today, but it's a lot harder and depends on what kind of graphics card you use. Granted, my old way required knowledge of the xorg.conf syntax, but once it was finished it gave me maximum configurability. Last time I checked, KDE 4 wasn't able to start two instances on :0.0 and :0.1 properly which is why I'm still using KDE 3 (a.k.a. "Trinity" today).
Hans-Georg
Not to bait you but you didn't actually debunk his post, are there any Win users here that use multiple monitors to give us a comparison?
No longer a Windows user; but Windows does not have any where near the same level of functionality for multi-monitor support the Linux does.
Here's a little glimpse:
- Windows allows you to either clone the monitors (e.g. presentation mode) or have one really big desktop that spans all the monitors; but applications can only min/max on one monitor; you can stretch an application to cross both monitors, but the max function provided by Windows won't do that.
- Windows leaves much of the multi-monitor support to the drivers. if you have several display adapters they better work well together at the driver level or you won't get multi-monitor. At work we tried adding a second monitor to a Windows system (2008 Server I think) but the driver for the second card would only work with other drivers that had WDM support; which the main card did not.
- As of WinXP SP3 Windows does provide a nice built-in utility for manipulating mutli-monitor support when it is available, but it's very limited. Usually you'll get more functionality out of the driver tools (e.g. nVidia's ControlPanel) that will let you do a bit more. In no cases do any of those tools provide the flexibility of what Linux provides.
This is true even of Windows 7; and given the lack of differences for Win8 I would assume so there to - those from what I have seen, Windows 8 will put the Metro interface on one monitor and the Desktop interface on a second monitor by default; so you're dual-head display is now essentially a single head display for with two different environments on each monitor. Might be the only way to use Windows 8 without getting rid of Metro.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
It is one of the features that I constantly have to wrestle with on Linux (which I use as my main OS), there is currently no real multi-screen support in a major distro and what support there is breaks regularly during updates. (This includes things like full screen flash, changing settings without rebooting, etc). I hope this will work with nvidia drivers, but from past experience I doubt it.
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