[compiz] multiscreen

[Sam Spilsbury]

Hi Brian

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Brian J. Murrell <brian at interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:
> I'm wondering what the status of multiscreen support is supposed to be
> in 0.9.7.12.  Using Ubuntu Precise, it seems that compiz only manages 1
> screen and if you want compiz on both screens of a dual screen set up
> you need to start two compiz sessions as such:
>
> $ DISPLAY=:0.0 compiz --replace
> $ DISPLAY=:0.1 compiz --replace
>
> What makes this all so strange is that even when one starts only the
> first one and leaves the second screen unmanaged my compiz, the compiz
> configuration settings manager still shows a pulldown for both screens
> in the upper left.

Support for one instance managing multiple screens was removed in
0.9.0, but I think you can manage more than one screen by using
separate instances as you've done.

Compiz should come up on both screens if you start it on both screens
separately. I think I saw this not work a few months ago, so perhaps
it might be worth looking into?

>
> What's more, if one does start two compiz managers, the settings changes
> made only affects the one screen despite what the screen pulldown in the
> upper left says and one has to stop the settings manager on screen 0 and
> start it on screen 1 to make any changes there.
>

I'm not sure what the state of multiscreen settings are. I don't think
they have been supported for quite some time. In my opinion, we should
probably just remove that dropdown. I don't think there's a very good
usecase for having per-screen settings, especially now that we have
one compiz instance per screen.

> In any case, what I am wondering is if this is the state of compiz in
> general or if all of this is nasty Ubuntu hacks.

Multiscreen is hardly a supported usecase anywhere, and many
compositing managers have been trying to phase it out. I know it is
also not working on other window managers such as Metacity. Most of
the big desktop shells also do not support it properly either.

The better thing to do in this instance is to use Xinerama-like
implementations to manage multiple monitors, or to have multiple
servers running for each head.

Cheers,

Sam

>
> Cheers,
> b.
>
>
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>



-- 
Sam Spilsbury