[gentoo-user] Re: dual monitors and dual desktops

[Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>]

On 2012-10-25, Kfir Lavi <lavi.kfir@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On 2012-10-25, Kfir Lavi <lavi.kfir@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > I have a laptop and an external monitor.
>>
>> Here's how I do it using Xorg.config
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Section "ServerLayout"
>>         Identifier     "Triple"
>>         Screen      0  "Samsung0"
>>         Screen      1  "Samsung1" rightof "Samsung0"
>>         Screen      2  "Acer" leftof "Samsung0"
>>         InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
>>         InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
>> EndSection
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> There are three Device sections (one for one video card, and one for
>> each of the DVI outputs on a second video card).  There are then three
>> corresponding Screen sections (named Samsung0, Samsung1, and Acer).
>>
>>
> Does this setup really separate the screens to 2 desktops and not one big
> virtual desktop?

My configuration above provides 3 separate X displays and 3 separate
desktops.

The mouse pointer and focus moves among the three screens as you would
expect, but each screen is a a separate X display.  The three DISPLAY
variables end up as ":0.0", ":0.1", and ":0.2". [There's only one X
server running.]

That means you can't drag a window from one screen to another, and a
window can't overlap across two screens.

It also means for a few applications you can only have the app running
on one screen at a time. The vast majority of X apps don't care. But
some, like Firefox (and other web browsers like Chrome and Opera),
have added extra logic to prevent it. You'll have to ask the
developers why, but I think it has something to do with their
unwillingness to deal with file-locking when accessing config files.

In _my_ particular configuration, I also have XFCE configured so that
each of the three screens is configured with a pager that can flip
through four virtual desktops independently of the other two screens.

So I actually have a total of 12 virtual desktops (3 sets of 4).

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards
                                  at
                              gmail.com