Xfce Forum

buhtz

Member

Registered: 2018-11-01

Posts: 21

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Two different multi-monitor setups

I am current and fresh Debain stable (10 / buster).
The current XFCE version must be 4.12.15.

I switch between HomeOffice and RealOffice each week - sometimes more often. I observe the problem that XFCE does not remember the monitor/display setup. It means the virtual position of each display, which one is the primary display, which one is on/off.

All setups/displays work when I setup them. But when I switch between Real- and HomeOffice the behaviour is strange and I often have to re-setup it again. I describe examples below.

The main question is if there is a way to use different display-setup profiles depending on the names and/or numbers of the present/connected monitors.

All used displays/monitors are correctly identified and named via the identify button. So there is no problem with recognizing the monitor hardware.

At HomeOffice:
The laptop is power on but it's display is closed. An extern monitor (old Eizo) is connected va DVI-Cable and HDMI-Adapter to the HDMI port of the Laptop.
Sometimes but not often the Laptop display is opened so I use both displays with the extern Eizo as primary.

At RealOffice:
The laptop display is closed. The laptop is connected to a docking station. There is an old Belina monitor connected via DVI-cable and HDMI-Adapter to the HDMI port of the docking station. There is a Dell monitor connected via DisplayPort cabel to the Displayport port of the docking station.

The behaviour:
When comming back from HomeOffice to RealOffice. I can see the boot and logon screen on both extern monitors. No Problem! But after loggin in the two monitors are going dark and losing the signal (status LED indicates stand by/no signal state). Via CTRL+F6 I can swich to tty6 which appears on the Dell monitor (should be the primary/main one). The second Belinea keeps black. Going back to X via CTRL+F7 make's them black again.
I open the laptop display which works then.
I re setup the displays. Sometimes this works.

Sometimes not. I set Dell to primary monitor. Belinea as second. and the laptop to "do not use this". Then all three displays going dark and I have to wait the 30(?) sec when the automatic configuration reset is done.

Display borders does not fit to the real monitors or the displays are overlapping. I can see this because of different desktop background images. e.g. the Belina show me 80% and the Dell the other 20% of the same deskop. And the other desktops are somewehre else.

My hardware:
The laptop is an IBM ThinkPad X13 Yoga and the related IBM docking station (in RealOffice only). Non-free Intel-Drivers are installed (from debian repostiory). I can confirm this because WLAN works which does not work out-of-the-box.

Is this a bug or an Issue of a possible improvment of XFCE?
I locate this Issue to XFCE because everything goes fine until I login.
But I am also have not tested other desktop environments yet. Maybe it is the same problem there. Which one should I test?
Because of the names of the monitors it should be easy for XFCE (or any other related software component) to identify the current setup (Real- or HomeOffice).