Dual monitor problem

Mon Apr 9 12:54:36 UTC 2018

Thank you to both Michal Srb and Marius Gedminas for taking the trouble 
to reply to my query and for their suggestions. I tried Michal's 
suggestion, but the same strange behaviour occurred on the laptop's 
display when the edited script ran without the external monitor plugged 
in. Marius's suggestion to adjust the monitors configuration was 
unfortunately beyond my limited skills.

I've now run up the white flag on the startup script idea. Instead, I 
created a custom launcher with an icon that resides on my top panel. 
Now, when I boot up with the external monitor connected, I just click on 
the icon and it runs: xrandr --output eDP1 --off. At least I've reduced 
the steps needed to one simple one.

Thank you again,

Leslie

On 2018-04-09 07:00 AM, xorg-request at lists.x.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
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>     1. Re: Dual monitor problem (Michal Srb)
>     2. Re: Dual monitor problem (Michal Srb)
>     3. Re: Dual monitor problem (Marius Gedminas)
>     4. Re: Dual monitor problem (Marius Gedminas)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2018 09:50:53 +0200
> From: Michal Srb <msrb at suse.com>
> To: xorg at lists.x.org
> Cc: Leslie Katz <lesliek at mymts.net>, xorg at freedesktop.org
> Subject: Re: Dual monitor problem
> Message-ID: <2873766.KkH69JJ0CU at sheogorath.suse.cz>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> On sobota 7. dubna 2018 23:13:48 CEST Leslie Katz wrote:
>> I have a laptop that I usually connect to an external monitor. I use
>> Ubuntu 16.04 and Gnome 3.18.5. When I do connect to the external
>> monitor, I like to turn the laptop screen off. I can do that by going to
>> System Settings, Screen Display, selecting the built-in display and then
>> clicking "off". I'd like to automate the process. I found a script that
>> claimed to do that at startup. It's as follows:
>>
>> #!/bin/bash
>>
>> sleep 15
>>
>> EXTERNAL_OUTPUT="DP1"
>> INTERNAL_OUTPUT="eDP1"
>>
>> xrandr |grep $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT | grep " connected "
>> if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
>>       xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --off --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT
>> --auto
>> else
>>       xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT --off
>> fi
>>
>> I made the script a startup application.
>>
>> It works as advertised when the external monitor is connected. However,
>> when the external monitor is not connected, I first see my desktop on
>> the laptop screen as I would like it. Then, when the script wakes up and
>> runs, the bottom panel on my desktop suddenly jumps to the top of the
>> screen and comes to rest immediately below the top panel. I can't find
>> any reports of this happening to anyone else.
>>
>> If anyone could explain to me why the script is causing this behavior
>> and tell me how to correct it, I'd be very grateful.
> If there is no external output the script reconfigures the internal output and
> disables the external output. I can't explain why the desktop environment
> reacts to it the way it does, but maybe you could just drop the whole else
> branch so nothing happens if there is no external output.
>
> So it would look somehow like this:
>
> ...
>
> xrandr |grep $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT | grep " connected "
> if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
>       xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --off --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto
> fi
>
> ...
>
> Michal Srb
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2018 09:50:53 +0200
> From: Michal Srb <msrb at suse.com>
> To: xorg at lists.x.org
> Cc: Leslie Katz <lesliek at mymts.net>, xorg at freedesktop.org
> Subject: Re: Dual monitor problem
> Message-ID: <2873766.KkH69JJ0CU at sheogorath.suse.cz>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> On sobota 7. dubna 2018 23:13:48 CEST Leslie Katz wrote:
>> I have a laptop that I usually connect to an external monitor. I use
>> Ubuntu 16.04 and Gnome 3.18.5. When I do connect to the external
>> monitor, I like to turn the laptop screen off. I can do that by going to
>> System Settings, Screen Display, selecting the built-in display and then
>> clicking "off". I'd like to automate the process. I found a script that
>> claimed to do that at startup. It's as follows:
>>
>> #!/bin/bash
>>
>> sleep 15
>>
>> EXTERNAL_OUTPUT="DP1"
>> INTERNAL_OUTPUT="eDP1"
>>
>> xrandr |grep $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT | grep " connected "
>> if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
>>       xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --off --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT
>> --auto
>> else
>>       xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT --off
>> fi
>>
>> I made the script a startup application.
>>
>> It works as advertised when the external monitor is connected. However,
>> when the external monitor is not connected, I first see my desktop on
>> the laptop screen as I would like it. Then, when the script wakes up and
>> runs, the bottom panel on my desktop suddenly jumps to the top of the
>> screen and comes to rest immediately below the top panel. I can't find
>> any reports of this happening to anyone else.
>>
>> If anyone could explain to me why the script is causing this behavior
>> and tell me how to correct it, I'd be very grateful.
> If there is no external output the script reconfigures the internal output and
> disables the external output. I can't explain why the desktop environment
> reacts to it the way it does, but maybe you could just drop the whole else
> branch so nothing happens if there is no external output.
>
> So it would look somehow like this:
>
> ...
>
> xrandr |grep $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT | grep " connected "
> if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
>       xrandr --output $INTERNAL_OUTPUT --off --output $EXTERNAL_OUTPUT --auto
> fi
>
> ...
>
> Michal Srb
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2018 13:32:54 +0300
> From: Marius Gedminas <marius at gedmin.as>
> To: xorg at lists.x.org, xorg at freedesktop.org
> Subject: Re: Dual monitor problem
> Message-ID: <20180409103254.2ccfwjfwyfqw4e4g at platonas>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> On Sat, Apr 07, 2018 at 04:13:48PM -0500, Leslie Katz wrote:
>> I have a laptop that I usually connect to an external monitor. I use Ubuntu
>> 16.04 and Gnome 3.18.5. When I do connect to the external monitor, I like to
>> turn the laptop screen off. I can do that by going to System Settings,
>> Screen Display, selecting the built-in display and then clicking "off". I'd
>> like to automate the process.
> GNOME should already automate that.  It remembers your settings for each
> set of connected monitor configurations, and when you plug in or unplug
> a monitor, it restores them.
>
> The configurations themselves are stored in ~/.config/monitors.xml.  The
> process responsible for applying them on hotplug/unplug events is
> gnome-settings-daemon.  (Ubuntu might have a unity-settings-daemon which
> is a fork of an older version of gnome-settings-daemon, but it does the
> same thing.)
>
> There's a way to turn that autoconfiguration off, which might explain
> why it's not happening for you.  It's a setting somewhere in
> dconf/gsettings, but I don't remember exactly where.
>
> HTH,
> Marius Gedminas

-- 

Leslie Katz

email: lesliek [at] mymts [dot] net

Please visit http://ssrn.com/author=1164057 to find hyperlinks

to papers that I’ve written on literary and legal topics