Xinerama dead? If not, Xinerama and Compiz-Fusion?

[Hal V. Engel]

On Wednesday 20 February 2008 14:11:10 Rui Tiago Cação Matos wrote:
> On 20/02/2008, Chad <masterclc at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> >  I've been reading threads all day regarding the use of Xinerama.  I've
> >  been using TwinView (GeForce 7600GT) but it had some quarks.  I have 2
> >  different size monitors, 1 19" square (1600x1200) and 1 19" wide
> >  (1440x900) connected to the DVI ports on the card.  With Twinview
> >  there was no way to have both monitors at their max resolution,
> >  instead the wide had a resolution of 1440x1200 and "panned" up and
> >  down.
>
> You can put twinview no work without panning. Check the docs.
>
> >  So, enough background... The threads I've been following seem to
> >  suggest Xinerama has been replaced with xRandr2?  If so, how do I
> >  "switch"?
>
> Current nvidia driver does not support randr 1.2. Go bug nvidia about that.
>
> Rui

I have been bugging Nvidia for almost a year about getting randr 1.2 support.   
They say it will happen but since that time they have released 1.xx to 100.xx 
to 169.xx versions of the driver and still no randr 1.2 support.

TwinView also has other issues.  One of these is that you can not access the 
video LUTs for both screens.  Since I do color critical work this makes 
TwinView unusable and other than the ability to change screen resultion 
without restarting the server I have yet to find any reason for the existence 
of TwinView.  The proprietary ATI driver also has this issue with the video 
card LUTs and multiple monitors in addition to not using the standard APIs 
for accessing the video LUTs.

My understanding is that Compiz-Fusion requires that the screens be re-sizable 
(I don't have any idea why?) and with Xinerama you always have a fixed screen 
size/resolution system since the size/resolution of the screens are fixed 
when the server starts and can not be changed without restarting the server.

Hal