KDE Multi-Monitor Control Getting An Overhaul 144
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).
Finally! (Score:1, Interesting)
Finally! I use KDE at work every day and this is the one major thing that makes me hesitate always when I need to disconnect my computer from a dock. Especially when there are three use cases that are always encountered: desktop monitor, projector, and just the plain laptop screen without any external monitors.
Vanilla version please.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Win 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the OP, it has multi-monitor support, but things like actually remembering the configuration you apply is inexplicably beyond its capabilities.
It remembers the configuration until you change the configuration. That is, with a desktop where you have several monitors connected all the time it won't be an issue. But with a laptop where you may have an external monitor part of the time then it is an issue whenever you switch between laptop only mode, and laptop plus external monitor mode. What's most annoying is when you have the external display as the primary; when you disconnect it the multi-monitor dialog prompting on to reconfigure shows up on the external monitor, not the only remaining monitor - so you're kind of screwed. Currently I make it a point to reconfigure to clone mode before undocking my laptop.
Re:Vanilla version please.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to see more vanilla versions of this software.
Well sure.
Here's the protocol extension: http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/randrproto/randrproto.txt [x.org]
Here's the xlib API:
http://xcb.freedesktop.org/manual/group__XCB__RandR__API.html [freedesktop.org]
Here's the command line tool:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/xrandr [die.net]
And here are a bunch of GUI wrappers:
http://christian.amsuess.com/tools/arandr/ [amsuess.com]
http://wiki.lxde.org/en/LXRandR [lxde.org]
Which would you like?
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.
Some times yes, but this isn't one of those cases. It's one of the nice really well designed parts, and not only that but any of those tools will work with any system. They modify the monitor layout, X sends a RANDR XEvent to the window manager and everything just works.
Re:year of the linux! (Score:0, Interesting)
This is 2012 and yet a lot of the free software refuse to handle the space character in the file name and/or path.
I am not talking about small one developer jobs. See Eclipse projects for example. On Windows, the main program directories have space and these free software sticks out like a sore thumb on their own at the root level.
If they failed for something as simple as string handling, multiple monitors are beyond them.