Multiple-Display Power Tools For Linux? 410
Posted
by
timothy
from the it's-a-hard-knock-life dept.
from the it's-a-hard-knock-life dept.
shift writes "I've used multiple monitors for years (currently 3) and find that Linux is lacking in power tools for such setups. Even Windows 7 has added the feature to move a window from screen to screen with keyboard shortcuts. Are any of the major desktop environments adding such features? I'm still stuck on FVWM and have defined functions to swap the contents of screens as well as move windows from screen to screen and so on. But this just seems like such basic functionality people would want in multi-screen setups that I'm surprised I don't find any of these features in our latest desktop environments."
Compiz can do it. (Score:5, Informative)
What's wrong with dragging windows? (Score:4, Informative)
Given that, if you really waanted keyboard control...
alt-space, down arrow, down arrow (to un-maximise), return
then
alt-space, down arrow, down arrow, down arrow (move)
use arrow keys to move window to wherever on your desktop you want it.
Parent just isn't ready for Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
Mod me up (I prefer "informative") but you know it's true
Multiple desktops (Score:5, Informative)
Keyboard Shortcut in GNOME (Score:5, Informative)
To move a window to another monitor (not workspace) in GNOME, press alt+F7, hold shift and the direction you want to move.
Tiling (Score:5, Informative)
Linux has many fine tiling window managers available, such as Xmonad, AwesomeWM, and StumpWM. These pieces of software deal very well with multi-monitor setups. They have support and expressive keybindings built in. They also automatically manage window size and placement, which is a great boon, especially if you have a lot of screen real estate: no more dragging windows around to see everything!
Truly, tiling window managers are screen-management power tools. I personally use Xmonad on four screens with named dynamic workspaces, which allows me to nicely label each set of windows and layout according to the content of the windows involved.
dwm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:dwm (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's wrong with dragging windows? (Score:2, Informative)
alt-space,x(to un-maximise), return then
alt-space,m(move)
use arrow keys to move window to wherever on your desktop you want it.
FTFY
Re:Another Question (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Another Question (Score:4, Informative)
I've heard anecdotal stories that Compiz can't cross video cards.
Compiz doesn't really have the problem here. It's the driver's problem. Specifically, on certain Intel video chips, there's a limit to the size of the framebuffer you can have with DRI, which Compiz requires. 2048x2048 was the limit, which is pretty hard to fit two-three monitors into with reasonable resolution, especially with the Widescreen Monitor Proliferation we've seen in the past decade. IIRC, this has been fixed with later drivers ("shatter" fb, which does exactly what it sounds like it does, was the solution I remember hearing about), but it plagued many for a very long time.
multiple monitors with FVWM for a long time (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using FVWM with multiple monitors for years. xrandr has simplified things considerably. I can drag from one monitor to another with no problem. Below is my current xorg.conf (note that I am running on Fedora 10). You can use a Radeon card by changing the driver to 'radeon'. Use 'lspci' to get the appropriate BusID for your card(s). There may be simpler solutions but this has worked well for me.
And for those saying to use a different window manager please note that FVWM has not stood still but is still true to the name it had when I began using it 15 years ago: the Frugal Virtual Window manager. It is frugal with regards to RAM and CPU use. I also like it because I can edit a file (gasp) to modify the configuration. For old farts like me that's a plus. YMMV.
Section "InputDevice"
# keyboard added by rhpxl
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "DVI0"
Option "Enable" "true"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "DVI1"
Option "LeftOf" "DVI0"
Option "Enable" "true"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600 GT"
Driver "nv"
BusID "PCI:1:00:0"
#Option "Monitor-DVI0" "DVI1"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600 GT"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Virtual 3840 1200
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen "Default Screen"
InputDevice "Generic Keyboard"
EndSection
here's my toolchain (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Multiple desktops (Score:1, Informative)
I usually make the window "sticky" or "always on visible workspace" in that scenario, then you can leave it playing fullscreen on the tv and it will follow you to all your workspaces
Is this a joke? (Score:2, Informative)
I must not be understanding the problem correctly. So help me out please. Is your set up a) 1 desktop stretched over 3 monitors? Yes? b) You want to move be able to movie, say Firefox, or a xterm, etc. from say monitor 1 to monitor 3 using keyboard shortcuts? c) You think a Linux desktop environment can't handle this currently?
If this is the correct setup you have, then you must not be a KDE user. This is trivial with KDE.
Setting the keybindings is trivial in KDE: KDE menu -> Computer -> System Settings -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Global Keyboard Settings -> Select Kwin application -> Select Pack windows to the right -> custom -> Click on wrench -> type shortcut. Ditto on Select Pack windows to the left.
I can't tell if you're trying to troll or you're like one of the "Great Old Ones" from H.P. Lovecraft's mythos who's just awakened from your deep slumber in some forgotten forbidding city up in the mountains. FVWM?!?!?! That's like 1994?!?! Not even FVWM95?!?! I had to double check my debian box to see if you could still get fvwm installed on a system.
I mean no disrespect if you're not trolling. I'm just shocked that someone would still be using *and* preferring fvwm in 2009 when I thought the last fvwm user went extinct in 1999 with the arrival of KDE and Gnome on the scene in 1998.
Re:xmonad window manager for multiple displays (Score:3, Informative)
Xmonad has a small learning curve if you're used to doing everything with the mouse but you can set any keybindings you like, it takes nearly no system resources to run, and handles multiple monitors extremely well.
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using linux for the last 10 years at home, finally ditching Windows entirely about 4 years ago (So I'm pretty decent at setting up/working with Linux)... Just 2 days ago, I tried to setup a 3 monitor desktop at work (2 Nvidia cards and 1 Intel card), and gave up after 10 hours of trying to get it work. I got X using them as different sessions (One instance of Gnome per monitor), but couldn't get a unified window manager between them... And I tried 2 different distributions (Ubuntu and Fedora)
One thing Windows does REALLY well right now, is multiple monitors. What you said, is pure anti-MS hatred. There's a lot that I don't think Windows does well, and a lot that I think Linux does REALLY well, but multiple monitors clearly isn't one...
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:3, Informative)
Did you seriously not expect to get called out on that?
http://imgur.com/RSTFx [imgur.com]
How the hell does this sort of crap keep getting modded informative?
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:2, Informative)
You're problem was entirely because you used two graphics cards. The same setup is unlikely to work under windows either unless you cards from the same manufacturer.
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm running three monitors on Windows XP, with a Radeon x1650 driving two and a Geforce 7600 running the other one. It was literally a matter of installing the ATI drivers, then the nVidia drivers, then checking a couple checkboxes. Both Catalyst and Nvidia control panel work fine.
Maybe I happened to pick a couple cards that don't interfere with each other?
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:5, Informative)
Did everybody miss the line in TFA where he said:
Still stuck on FVWM?
Windows 3.1 had pretty miserable multi screen support too. That's why everyone dumped it like a leaking baby diaper.
Ubuntu, and KDE both handle multiple monitors very well.
Why would the OP mention Windows 7 in the same post where he whines about FVWM?
Level playing field much?
Re:Tiling (Score:5, Informative)
stumpwm tiling across five monitors at different resolutions [nongnu.org]
There is also a window manager that has some similar features called xmonad [wikipedia.org], but it is written in Haskell, so it has a bit of a syntactic learning curve if that matters to you.
xmonad tiling across three monitors [wikipedia.org]
On a side note, it's interesting that the proliferation of Lisp, Haskell, and other powerful functional programming languages has created a demand for a different kind of window manager that is written in, and can be extended with, the language. It's almost as if programmers began to see the limitations of static, C/C++ programmed environments after they started using these languages, and then started to build up new environments more suitable for high-level programming. Is this the beginning of the end for the traditional Unix way of always running back to the C languages?
KDE 4.2 has shortcuts to move screen (Score:3, Informative)
Settings -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Global shortcuts -> Kwin
Window to screen \d
Kwin has a lot of shortcuts you can define.
I don't know what the post is all about, but it is defiantly not true.
Re:I hope you're not a troll (Score:3, Informative)
Any number greater than one counts as several.
several -adjective
1. being more than two but fewer than many in number or kind: several ways of doing it.
(dictionary.com unabridged)
several adj.
1. Being of a number more than two or three but not many: several miles away.
(american heritage)
several determiner & pronoun - more than two but not many.
(oxford compact)
It sounds very much to me like more than two is necessary. Some dictionaries suggest more than three.
FVWM was first released in 1993, i.e. less than two decades ago. Twm could just about scrape through the requirements, being 22 years old now.
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:2, Informative)
> but Windows has the multi-monitor down pat
No, it hasn't. Had been removed after XP. Server 2008 and Vista do not support Multi-Graphiccard-Multiscreen-Solutions any more.
Newer Linux AND Windows releases leave multi-screen completely to the drivers. So if your Driver supports a card with two screen connectors, then you are ready. If not, things get ugly.
Setting up two screens on my Geforce 6600 and 8800 systems with Ubuntu is piece of cake, start Nvidia-Tool, active and configure screens, ready.
Re:What about the text console? (Score:3, Informative)
So, each can clearly show unique content in text mode, but does any tool exist that can bring some order to it?
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Framebuffer-HOWTO-14.html [tldp.org] mentions a tool called con2fb. I haven't tried it, but it sounds like it does what you want.
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:3, Informative)
Multiple graphics cards? That's a very exotic multiple-display configuration these days now that dual-head graphics cards are the standard. So if you act like your experience with your exotic setup is typical, you can expect shocked reactions from the 99% of multi-display users currently using a single dual-head graphics card with no problems or setup difficulty.
The most common problem is having to use nvidia's setup tool instead of the standard 'display preferences' control panel because nvidia is taking forever to implement xrandr 1.3. But on the upside, they have their own (proprietary) solution to support hardware acceleration with a Xinerama setup [nvidia.com] (with similar cards).
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:4, Informative)
Xinerama keeps things aware of monitor boundaries (at least, I'm using multiple monitors with Xinerama right now, and things work properly).
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:3, Informative)
A single card with two heads is easy, yes. Multiple cards, though, can get tricky, especially if they're not from the same manufacturer (by which I mean Intel, ATI, or nVidia).
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:3, Informative)
Firstly, you do know that neither Vista nor 7 will let you use multiple cards with different drivers (e.g. you can't even use substantially different generations of nvidia cards together)? So much as you complain about it being hard to use nvidia+Intel cards for 3 screens on Linux, it's actually impossible in the latest versions of Windows.
Secondly, in terms of your Linux setup, you need to use Xinerama and disable nvidia TwinView. The way to do this is to add two separate "Device" sections (within /etc/X11/xorg.conf) for the same nvidia card, with one marked as "Screen 0" and one marked as "Screen 1". Then you need a separate Screen for each of those Devices, plus another for the Intel card. Secondly, make sure that you have Xinerama enabled (add Options "Xinerama" "on" within the ServerFlags section). Finally, make sure that within the "ServerLayout" section you have all three of your screens mentioned and using the "LeftOf" or "RightOf" keywords to make sure they are glued together. There's an example xorg.conf here [froebe.net] for example.
These types of setups aren't easy to setup with graphical tools in Linux (where perhaps they should be) but if you understand a bit about how xorg.conf works they are not too hard to configure.
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:1, Informative)
Plug in monitor.
Click System/Preferences/Display.
Click X-Server Display Configuration.
Click Detect Displays.
Select Twinview from the combo selector.
Click Apply.
Close the dialog box.
You'd have to be a real mouth-breather to find that difficult.
Re:Partially correct, he is (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, the Nvidia-applet works fine, doing anything with the TV of my liking. But it would require the user to know that she uses a Nvidia card, and that there is another applet that she needs to use. Not good.
How is this different from Windows? If I want to do something special with graphics output under XP, I use the Intel applet that sits in the system tray. ATI and nVidia also have their own special applets under Windows.
Re:You need a GUI? (Score:2, Informative)
Unless Xorg decides that the maximum allowable view is smaller than that allowed by your multiple monitors.
In which case, you have to create an almost empty Display SubSection to tell it what is really allowed. Then restart X.
It took me less than half an hour to find this (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2), but it is not obvious and most people do not know how to create xorg.conf and people now say you don't need one!
Cheers,
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:4, Informative)
If you're using just Xinerama or Twinview then screen boundaries are respected.
There's a "fake xinerama" patch available though that works around the TwinView with Xinerama problem.
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:3, Informative)
Just because you can post a screenshot of a Linux machine running multi-head, doesn't rebut at all the fact that it's a pain in the ass to set up,
Plug in monitor.
Click System/Preferences/Display.
Click X-Server Display Configuration.
Click Detect Displays.
Select Twinview from the combo selector.
Click Apply.
Close the dialog box.
You'd have to be a real mouth-breather to find that difficult.
And you'd have to be a complete moron to think that always works. I have one of the older ATI cards at work and up until the latest version of ubuntu (with newish open source drivers) I'd routinely get graphics corruption. On my newer ATI card at home, there are no decent open source drivers and driving two screens with the propietary drivers is a real pain. Like when notifications suddenly start appearing partway off screen. Not to mention when I use compiz, video playback is dog slow, and there doesn't seem to be an easy way to fix that.
There are enough horror stories out there to get that it's still not quite there yet. xrandr is nice, but it's taken the propietary vendors a bit to catch up. Yes, it would be nice if they open sourced everything. Not going to happen though, so it might be a good idea to have a stable API for once, so it doesn't end up breaking every 6 months.
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:2, Informative)
> but Windows has the multi-monitor down pat
No, it hasn't. Had been removed after XP. Server 2008 and Vista do not support Multi-Graphiccard-Multiscreen-Solutions any more.
Windows 7 does.
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=637&pgno=8 [techarp.com]
Windows 7 supports heterogeneous multi-adapter configurations, whereas Windows Vista does not. In Windows 7, a system can have a heterogeneous multi-adapter configuration, with multiple GPUs that require different WDDM drivers. The WDDM model for Windows Vista required that all display adapters use the same driver.
Additional sources [google.com]
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:3, Informative)
What kind of crack are you on! Windows will take just about any piece of shit video card you have and multi head it without problems.
Plug it in, install drivers, "extend desktop to this monitor"
It's been this easy for a good 10 years now.
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:3, Informative)
According to that article heterogeneous multi-adapter will work in Vista/W7 if you use XPDM drivers instead of WDDM drivers.
At least that's my understanding of this:
A user could force the installation of a XPDM driver for each of these devices, and therefore get heterogeneous multi-adapter multi-monitor to work as in Windows XP.
Re:Issues I've had. (Score:2, Informative)
I'm still using fvwm and have been doing it for 10+ years. Over the years I've tried switching to gnome or KDE several times but found them too be too slow and lacking features and ended up back in fvwm again. I even tried gnome + sawfish for a while but the constant lisp hacking got the best of me. Fvwm has for a long time and still handle multiple monitors perfectly well and I'm still very happy with it.