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).
In Other News (Score:4, Insightful)
In other news, readers demand to know when Slashdot is getting getting an editor.
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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.
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It's not that hard (Score:3)
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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 anot
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Also also, if your monitors arent' the same size, a small window that appears on the smaller
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There is no dead zone on the smaller monitor when different resolutions are used. The smaller or equal
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Getting Getting (Score:1)
Is the medi medi cation cation taking effect effect yet yet?
But this is Linux (Score:5, Funny)
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Obviously you're being sarcastic, but the correct response would be to tell people to use xrandr by hand. Editing the config file requires you to (a) have one and (b) restart X.
I use arandr these days. It does a good enough job.
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You're supposed to know how to hack your xconfig with vi. Setting up two displays is supposed to hurt.
Don't be ridiculous, you're allowed to use vim in this day and age.
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
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Here's the other side of open source: "write it yourself."
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Boy, you don't know how good you have it these days, to complain about that. Now you have dbus/hald standardizing things. Back when I was walking to school uphill both ways, we were lucky to have an EDID versus probing ID0-4 pins directly, and you'd be editing XConfig to set your VGA MMIO window base.
Anyway, while I agree the "yet another library" thing gets old, it is my impression that the display system configuration gets pretty intimate with the desktop suite, and any generic library for configuring t
Re:Vanilla version please.... (Score:5, Funny)
XRANDR. It's all you need -- a daemon watching EDIDs and speaking XRANDR.
And an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.
Ah, amongst the things you need.....
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.
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There's also a simple command line app that can switch between X11 configurations easily. You set up the different configurations you want (laptop on the go, projector, multi monitor, etc, memorize them and then recall them when you need). I won't be much more informative that that because I don't remember the name of the app !
There's also the option to add:
alias 'xrandr --blah' setup_monitor_projector
alish 'xrandr --foo' setup_monitor_internal_only
etc, or put each line in a file in ~/bin and chmod +x it.
No
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-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1,3K pa 19 2011
Is 1,3K app good enough for you? Disper [engen.nl] is also great when configured for Meta+Fn keys in KDE, I have a simple way of switching display modes almost as good as the one on Windows 7.
Just Free Systems (Score:1)
I don't think Windows handles multiple monitors very well either. It's not just free operating systems, it's all operating systems. 3rd party utilities are the only thing that come close to making multiple monitors behave well.
Re:Just Free Systems (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Before Windows 2000, yes. Since then, what you describe would be extremely unusual.
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Before Windows 2000, yes. Since then, what you describe would be extremely unusual.
I had that problem on a number of WinXP systems, so no it's still very much the norm. Now may be the Video driver rewrite for Vista corrected some of that for Vista and Win7, and now Win8. Microsoft has been slowly building in proper multi-monitor support, but even with what they provide there still a lot of details left to the video card drivers.
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Indeed. One frustrating issue I have with Windows 7 is that my second monitor is connected to a KVM switch and when I switch to my Linux box and back to W7 only one monitor is active. I have to manually detect displays in W7 for it to go back to normal.
You need to get yourself a better KVM switch, that passes through the EDID information.
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Win 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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heh, XP handled it pretty well too though not as automatic
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Hell, Win 98 SE handled it pretty well, though again not as automatic. I used 3rd party software to get more transparancy effects on 98, but didn't bother with it for multiple monitor configuration. Admittedly, I was only running 3 monitors and never tested it to see if it could really handle the promised 9.
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yea I used to run 3 on 98 as well, my then brand new 21 inch LCD, and 2 15 inch crt's on either side ... I was into digital video editing at that point
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Linux had multi-monitor support years before Windows did.
Re:Win 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
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According to the OP, it has multi-monitor support, but things like actually remembering the configuration you apply is inexplicably beyond its capabilities.
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:Win 7 (Score:4)
It remembers the configuration until you restart.
FTFY [kde.org]
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MacOS had it before Linux I believe...
Supposedly it dates back to the Macintosh II which supported multiple monitors.
Then again, DOS might be the very first use...
Re:Win 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Then again, DOS might be the very first use...
DOS did have multi monitor support from day 1, but not in the way we think of it today. You could combine a CGA card (or later EGA, VGA, etc) with an MDA (monochrome, text only) card. The idea was to use the MDA for high resolution (at the time) text and the CGA for low res graphics. Software had to be specifically written for it, but it was possible. Later, some DOS debuggers could use the MDA as a debug output separate from the main screen.
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If I remember my Inside Macintosh well... (Score:2)
...the original Mac had the basis for this designed in from the beginning. The Mac had a graphics region (65k x 65k pixels) larger than the display region. The window was a display port on this region.
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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?
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My 86 mac SE came had a external monitor port and a radius card installed when I rescued it from the recyclers, so yea, its been around on Mac's for a while
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This is technically true. However, I haven't forgotten the hours it took me to hand-edit my XFree86.conf long after it had become unnecessary to do so for single-monitor configurations.
When I finally got a configuration I was happy with, I found that I had to be very careful to keep hold of that configuration file no matter what else I did - whether it was upgrading or moving to a different distribution altogether. It was the only way to be sure I could get it to work again.
It was having to go through this
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It might have had support for multi monitors, but it was far more awkward to setup and was never quite as good.
I have been hooked on multi monitor setups since I had a Matrix g550 a few years back. Newly released Windows XP as it was in those days just dealt with it all beautifully.
Linux on the other hand used to be a bit more quirky, certainly under Gnome. You could use both monitors as a single desktop but if you did the maximise button would insist on maximising everything across both monitors instead of
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Xinerama may not have come about until 1998, but multiple screen support was built into X from the beginning. That's where the whole :0.0, :0.1, etc. business comes from.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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It's nice to be able to drag things around, and unless I'm remembering incorrectly separate x sessions are just that. If you open a window on display Y it stays on display Y. Back when I was first using dual monitors I had them set that way and things were a bit quirky. Firefox wouldn't open on one dislay if it was already open on another, there were a few other apps that didn't play nice either. I'm currently on two monitors via twinview and a third via synergy on a different machine (which is a bit li
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I got this set up with two monitors currently, because my graphics card has one output fried so I used two graphics cards. It was a surprise to see the new X session come up on the left (my secondary) with default panel settings (even more default than the distro itself). This is on linux mint 13 mate, which is effectively ubuntu 12.04 with gnome 2, so my distro is not too unusual.
Not being able to even move a terminal window and not having same desktop configuration etc. made me give it up after I couldn't
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Go re-read my post. Windows handles it flawlessly and 3rd party software adds in even more features to account for my fairly non-standard setup of different size monitors with different resolutions that are not on a flat surface.
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It works fine for me. I use a second monitor at home and at work and it remembers the settings for both without any extra work on my part.
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KDE handles my monitor setup OK -- one large widescreen monitor, one rotated-right smaller monitor, and they don't line up.
This is connected to a laptop (VGA and HDMI), and the laptop monitor can't be used at the same time (doesn't work on Windows either). The problem at present is if I disconnect it and plug in to a projector. I actually have two usernames set up with different monitor configurations; since I disconnect it so rarely this was the easiest solution.
My colleagues have the same equipment but
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I'm using Linux with four monitors at four different resolutions, and they all line up seamlessly, even at different vertical elevations. Linux is able to do this just as well as Windows (in fact I would say better than Windows, if you have to download a third party program like Ultramon to get it to work properly), the only difference is that Windows/Ultramon gives you a GUI, while most Linux users are satisfied with editing configuration files, because that's what they're used to and comfortable with.
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I'm a very capable Linux user, have been using it since it came on 22 floppies. For a long time I enjoyed all the tinkering.
Priorities have changed, I've dropped it in favour of Mac because I have more important things to spend my time on.
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"the only difference is that Windows/Ultramon gives you a GUI, while most Linux users are satisfied with editing configuration files, because that's what they're used to and comfortable with. "
The difference is Windows has a GUI that doesn't change for 15 years, things like "system", "device manager" and resolution dialog are virtually the same across versions. But Linux, one day you find out xorg.conf is "deprecated" and you shouldn't use it. But it's a lie, you can still modify it. Another day, you find o
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So why do people still cook their own food when you can just buy ready made meals? Lots of people enjoy the process as much as the end product, and Linux users are no different.
Besides, Linux has never been about "free" in cost or time. It has been "free" as in the freedom to use it how you see fit. If you don't like the time it takes, you're free not to use it. Nobody said it was easy. But just because it doesn't work for you, it doesn't mean it's useless for everybody.
Pathetic (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
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I've used multiple monitors with KDE for around six years now. Basic multi-screen functionality has been around for ages. They're improving it, not introducing it.
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Do you not understand the meaning of the phrase 'getting an overhaul' or did you not even bother to read the _title_ fully before posting?
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As someone who uses dual monitors on KDE fairly frequently, this kinda seems like 'meaningless bullshit' as well to me. Multiple monitors already worked just fine.
So my point was that the OP seemed to essentially say 'rather than improving these things that already work, they should improve this other thing that already works'.
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It's why you're better off to wait for jesus to return than the mythical "year of linux desktop".
You should RTFM before posting this heresy. man revelation states that the mark of the beast is linux kernel 6.6.6, which predates the Second Coming of Christ. Older print manuals invoked kernel 6.1.6, but that turned out to be an error with a possessed dot matrix printer.
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The "artists" who insist on wanking with gaudy UI trifles need to be LARTed into weeping pulps.
They don't care about users. At all.
About time (Score:1)
Unfortunately, I am now quite familiar with my xorg.conf file.
My point: Linux multi-monitor support is one area where it has dragged behind Windows and it's about time somebody started seriously working on it.
TwinView (Score:3)
nvidia-settings
Detect Displays
Click on newly-detected display and select "TwinView" and "Clone Displays".
Click apply.
Done, works with all window managers.
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Then, it's standard randr calls, and it's easy...oh, and XFCE has had standard dual monitor support for a while now, although it doesn't always place nice with nouveau/randr until you actually setup screen 2 and above as other screens. Otherwise, it just clones the primary's output.
Nouveau doesnt support CUDA (Score:2)
If it supported Opencl that would be a start.
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yea, but then your geforce 560TI runs as fast as a MX420
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Unable to store a successful config and reproduce it with a single hot key.
After long time fiddling with nv-control-dpy and xrandr I have a somewhat working solution, which crashes the X server every time I go from my home config to my office config.
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Yes. Now try getting that to work with 3 monitors. TwinView is only for spanning two monitors, even if your graphics card has 4 outputs. You cannot get KDE to provide a single desktop experience across 3 monitors with TwinView, and Xinerama is going the way of the Dodo and is very slow. I have a triple head setup working with KDE but the only way is to have TwinView on the left two as a single X screen, and the right monitor is another X screen running an independant instance of KDE. Works for my workflow,
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Many applications are also behaving pretty bad - like displaying a popup on another monitor than the main application window. Surprisingly, Windows applications running in wine deal nicely with multiple monitors.
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Too bad my nvidia can't scale the cloned image therefore making the cloned mode useless...
Sure it can. Use the RandR 1.2 scaling options or the ViewPortIn / ViewPortOut metamode thingies.
Year of the Linux desktop? (Score:1)
They're really working hard now! (Score:1)
Considering that Macintoshes have had these features for over a quarter century, this is great news.
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Linux has as well; the 'news' here is that now, how you set it up will be dependent on your DM rather than your graphics card driver. Unless you want to do it the old way.
In terms of functionality this is _entirely_ redundant. It's just making things a bit easier to find I suppose.
Great to hear (Score:1)
Mike
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Yeah, it'll be a great day when you learn to write, what, five lines? of shell script in your .xinitrc (or local equivalent). Definitely long overdue.
The problem they're trying to solve, the one that everyone (except you and ubuntu users, I guess) doesn't solve by themselves if they run linux on a laptop, is not detecting and selecting a configuration when you start your session (or at any other given time, even at the click of a button), that's ridiculously simple. The problem is switching back and forth b
We got back to the linux pain point, graphics. (Score:2)
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 i
Cloning diplays with different resolutions (Score:2)
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,
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If you output to VGA you can use the rescaler built into the monitor. Sadly, this doesn't work with most flat panels on digital outputs - they lack a rescaler because they assume the video card will match their resolution.
My experience with multiple monitor (Score:1)
Well, I'm using KDE with two monitors right now. (left/right configuration). However, I configured these with the Radeon tool which works well with little fuss. Ditto with multiple monitors on Nvidia (the vendor tool works nicely).
My biggest complaint about multiple displays on KDE is what happens if you have a transient display (not always connected). When I have my laptop at my work-desk, I connect to a bigger monitor and have dual-head. However, if I don't disable the dual-head before using the laptop wi
Good news (Score:2)
Filed a few bugs in my time, nice of them to take notice.
TFS mentions only GNOME2. How is the multi-monitor status on other DEs nowadays? XFCE, GNOME3, MATE etc.? Cinnamon would still be the same as GNOME2, right?
Only like (Score:1)
10 years too late?
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I've had two monitors for over a year now, and KDE's always recognized if I unplug one and plug one back in. It always remembers and restores my configuration. No messing with xorg.conf (I don't even have an xorg.conf file), and no playing RandR, twinview, etc.
I have no doubt that there are issues out there, but multiple monitors works flawlessly with my one video card and two matching monitors on KDE 4.9. But, as I say, I've only had two monitors for about a year or so, meaning I can't speaking for the
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It has become loads better in recent years.
Back in the day it wasn't even really worth trying... you could do it, but it was a pain... it didn't work with some drivers, if each screen had a high resolution you couldn't run it at it's native resolution with some cards.
All in all, I'm glad it is improving... it seems to me though that this should have been a priority long ago when both Windows and OS X handled dual monitors with ridiculous ease.
Support for four monitors on 2 different cards? (Score:2)
My work machine has four (yes) monitors, two on a Radeon 7000 series and two on the Intel IGP. Win7 works mostly[1] flawlessly, but Mint will only see the two Intel-powered monitors by default. I'm given to understand that I can get all four going, but it'd involve writing a custon xorg.conf and I can't be bothered since I'm usually in Win7 because that's what I have to support.
[1] fairly often the Intel driver will crash and be automatically restarted on resume from sleep.
That gnome2 "feature" was an evil and stupid hack (Score:2)
If a user used that tool to set a resolution that was not available to the hardware the only ways around it were to create a new user account for them and copy the files over or to log in remotely and fuck about with the braindead registry clone (only worse) that is gconf - think a MS Windows registry only without regedit and without any man pages for the obscure registry key manipulating software. Th
Does this mean... (Score:2)
... that my taskbar will finally start up on a deterministic screen, and no longer the crapshoot of Left-only, Right-only, or spanned-across-both every single time I log on?
Welcome to 1999! EOM (Score:1)
EOM
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When I disconnect the external monitor, it automagically moves APP windows and panes to laptop monitor, that is configured as secondary screen. When I replug the monitor, APP windows that previously where on it, return to it, as do the panes...
I'm running 12.04 Kubuntu and no, it doesn't work properly when I undock my laptop; and yes, I keep the external monitor (DVI) as the primary and "to the left of" the internal monitor (LVDS).
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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?
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I was confused by the whole 'multiple monitors are a pain' thing. I've been running KDE for close to a decade and for the past couple years multi-monitor support has never been a problem. Of course, I'll admit, mostly when I'm using multiple monitors I'm cloning the display to watch a movie or something...but I plug it in, it mirrors. I unplug it, it disconnects. What's so hard there?
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Macs have supported multiple monitors since what, 1988 or so? That just work/easily configurable/reconfigurable..
haha you're funny.
(my macbook pro doesn't properly output to my 1920x1200 monitor).