David R. MacIver's Blog

Ooooooh. Shiny!

When I built this computer I bought two very nice monitors to go with it.

I then promptly discovered that I had *no idea* how to make two monitors work under linux. X configuration is dark magic to me. Consequently the second monitor got shunted to my other machine and I’ve had a spare old monitor kicking around for a while.

However, my computer recently died and I had to reinstall, and in doing so and poking around with video settings I discovered that the “nvidia-settings” program includes support for making multiple monitors work flawlessly. A few quick clicks and I had the two monitors working side by side very nicely. Yay!

I do however note that Gnome doesn’t handle them that well. This will probably induce me to finally get off my ass and try a better window manager. I tried Enlightenment earlier, but E16 didn’t work, the repository version of E17 is kinda unstable (not to mention Enlightenment is *really confusing*, but I’m sure I’d get used to it) and I haven’t quite worked up the courage/botheredness to install the CVS version yet.

Anyone know what a good window manager is for use with xinerama? Should I be giving XMonad a try?

Comments

ephemient on 2007-09-29 21:48:00:

s/Evolution/Enlightenment/
Hmm, I’ve never tried E16 or E17 with multiple monitors. That sounds interesting...

XMonad works quite well with multiple monitors, but it’s not “easy” to use.

From my experience, Gnome’s multiple-monitor support is only a little worse than Xfce’s and KDE’s, which are tolerable. So I’m a bit curious as to what problems you ran into.

David R. MacIver on 2007-09-29 21:56:00:

Woops, braino there. Thanks for the catch. I’ve fixed it now. :-)

Gnome’s support for multiple monitors isn’t exactly “bad”. It’s just very basic as far as I can tell - it’s totally non-obvious to me how to make it do anything interesting.

Maybe this is a case of me not being able to figure it out more than it not being there though. Trivial example: I’d like to be able to move a window to the corresponding spot on the other monitor (via the keyboard). There don’t appear to be any hooks for me to actually do this with.

Daniel on 2007-09-29 22:26:00:

I have no experience with xmonad and multiple monitors yet, but I’m a happy xmonad user. I wouldn’t recommend it to my mom, but I find myself spending considerably less time managing my screen real estate.

ephemient on 2007-09-29 22:39:00:

wmctrl could solve that particular issue. I haven’t seen any windowing system, on any platform, that has that feature built-in.

David R. MacIver on 2007-09-29 23:30:00:

I got used to the feature when I was on windows using an extension called ultramon. It’s rather nice to have.

I wasn’t particularly looking for the feature built in. I was more looking for hooks into the window manager’s handling of multiple screens, and couldn’t find any for gnome.

Anyway, I’m giving xmonad a try now. I’m tentatively very impressed. It handles multiple monitors rather nicely, is very keyboard driven (which I love) and rather to my surprise I’m really liking the tiling effect.

Jeremy Shaw on 2007-10-01 19:17:00:

I would recommend giving xmonad a try. You can either use the release version, or just use the latest darcs version. I have been updating to darcs head daily since almost day one, and have never had a problem.

xmonad has first class support for xinerama. I have not used it on a multihead machine, but a number of core developers do.

If you have never used a tiling window manager, the first few days will be a bit weird. But, once you figure out the usage pattern that you like, and tweak a few config settings, it is quite pleasant.

David R. MacIver on 2007-10-01 19:36:00:

You’re too late. :-) I switched to XMonad on saturday, took to it almost immediately and haven’t looked back since (modulo a few issues with interaction with dzen which seem to be sorted now. I hope).