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[SOLVED] KDE/XRandR: secondary left of primary monitor
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c00l.wave
Apprentice
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Joined: 24 Aug 2003
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PostPosted: Wed May 21, 2014 11:11 am    Post subject: [SOLVED] KDE/XRandR: secondary left of primary monitor Reply with quote

I just got upgraded to a dual-monitor setup. The primary monitor should be positioned right of the secondary one: secondary | primary. While this worked well with a notebook before, having two identical monitors yields a different result: I don't seem to be able to get new windows to open on the primary monitor only and I don't have the setting that the active screen should follow the mouse pointer, most likely because XRandR/KDE configured not two but only one screen spanning both physical monitors at a resolution of 3840x1200 instead of 2 screens at 1920x1200 each. New windows either open on the wrong monitor or on the screen center (that is "between both monitors"). Maximized windows span both monitors as well as fullscreen options in browsers etc.

I read that the window manager might be tricked into the desired behaviour of placing windows on the right-hand display by setting the secondary screen not "left of" the primary one or the primary one to use an offset of 1920, 0 but instead setting the primary monitor to absolute 0, 0 offset and the secondary one to -1920, 0. However, this doesn't work (gets reset to "left of" each time upon loading the settings).

I also tried kscreen which doesn't help in any way regarding my problem as it appears to be just a graphical wrapper for position settings? The result stays the same.

If I were to define a second X screen manually via xorg.conf, would that help and would I still be able to move the mouse pointer and windows across both monitors or would that be a hard separation of both screens in terms of a classic multi-terminal setup?

I just want the second (left-hand) monitor to be used "auxillary", so I can drop windows there to keep open while I primarily work on the primary (right-hand) monitor. How can that be achieved in KDE?
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Last edited by c00l.wave on Thu May 22, 2014 8:49 am; edited 1 time in total
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chithanh
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Joined: 05 Aug 2006
Posts: 2158
Location: Berlin, Germany

PostPosted: Wed May 21, 2014 11:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It seems that you are missing the xinerama USE flag for qtgui and possibly some oether packages. You need to enable it so the applications understand the xinerama protocol to query the screen layout from the X server. (Note: this has nothing to do with the multihead configuration method which is also called Xinerama)

Your desktop widgets will then reside on the primary monitor (can be set through xrandr --primary) and new application windows will open on the primary monitor unless a window on the secondary monitor is in focus.
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toralf
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Joined: 01 Feb 2004
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PostPosted: Thu May 22, 2014 8:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

chithanh wrote:
IYou need to enable it so the applications understand the xinerama protocol to query the screen layout from the X server. (Note: this has nothing to do with the multihead configuration method which is also called Xinerama)
which is one of the things I don't and don't want understand ;)
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c00l.wave
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PostPosted: Thu May 22, 2014 8:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just added xinerama to global USE flags and ran emerge -uD --newuse world; it appears to work now, thanks! :D

Having to use a mix of XRandR and Xinerama is really strange; is that a KDE issue or something more general? Because xrandr -q still shows just one screen at 3840x1200, so why does KDE (or X or whatelse) need Xinerama anyway? It doesn't appear there's any extra information nor setup KWin wouldn't already have from purely XRandR (and KDE's own settings).
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toralf
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PostPosted: Thu May 22, 2014 8:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

FWIW I do use xrandr in a script : ~/.kde4/env/monitor.sh - this is automatically started early during KDE login and does what I want.
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