Xfce Forum

frpatte

Member

Registered: 2013-07-11

Posts: 24

multihead configuration problems

Bonjour,

I run a 3-head configuration with an nvidia GPU (GeForce GTX 1050 Ti). two monitors are plugged on DVI ports and one on the displayport port. They are configured like this:

|| displayport || DVI-I || DVI-II ||

When I call Applications>Settings>Display, and ask to identify the screens, I have:

screen 1 is DVI-I
screen 2 is displayport
screen 3 is DVI-II

I ticked DVI-I to be the main screen.

While configuring xfce, I put the panel on the main screen (ie. DVI-I) but, while the display menu says that it is the screen 1, I have to configure the panel to be on monitor 2.... This seems to me strange (but it works...)

Now, if I plug an external device (usb stick, usb drive, dvd or cd) the icons go on screen 2 (displayport).... Why not on the main screen? Same behaviour for dialog boxes: they always open on screen 2!

Is there a way to have everything (icons, dialog boxes, new windows...) by default on the main screen? This seems to me to be more logical, because my left screen (displayport) is a screen that I use for photo treatment and is often in standby when I work on other things?

Maybe, I misconfigured xfce but I did not find how to have this behaviour.

Thank you for helping.

F.P.

CwF

Member

Registered: 2018-01-28

Posts: 305

Re: multihead configuration problems

I have a few tidbits without solution...

I've used 2-4 monitors in many mixes and found for whatever reason only an OS declared VGA-1 as primary does it become consistent. Even then it occasionally throws up a window on -2. The other side of this is I've found all mixes of pure digital, DVI, HDMI, or DP, there seems to be no priority like VGA has.

I looked around once at modifying launchers to include screen and position declarations. Seems per program and I'm unaware of some global way to do this. Over time, just like the above randomness it works, then doesn't.

I believe panels are sensitive to the config when created. It may say "monitor 2" but think it uses some other identifier internally and that user definition 'monitor2' never gets updated. Recreating it would fix that I think.

Before that you could look at the xorg config since that's what is declaring the screen order, in your case an auto-detect order, and more specifically the in which order the video card enumerates. If you were to manually order in an xorg config file you can fix this, but then you lose easy automagical changes without a manual edit.

I'd like to enable a third or fourth monitor, work around, the disable it. Not smooth at all. A few clicks may enable it fine, but the disable allows a short musical chairs game for which monitor will be which... I gave up

My system matured to use all 4 monitors, but 2 are VM's, so 2 on the host with one VGA it no longer gets confused.