Plasma and TwinView [Was Re: Release schedule clarifications]

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 25.10.07 21:20:55, Andras Mantia wrote:
> On Thursday 25 October 2007, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > i have no xinerama systems to test on here. people will come in to
> > #plasma and complain about it and will sometimes give some minimal
> > system information, but we *really* need someone with a xinerama set
> > up to test on and work on these things.
> 
> Guys, I have good news. :) Almost all the slowness gone away as soon as 
> I disabled the second screen! Even the K Menu appeared (altough the 
> reason for this might be that I removed the .kde4 directory).

That assumption is correct (about the k menu), I didn't have it either
and couldn't drag it from the add-applets widget, but removing .kde4
helped - and I didn't switch to single-screen-mode.

> Now the 
> highest CPU usage I could see was around 10% by Xorg. But the desktop 
> was in general responsive.
>  Aaron, how can I help to debug and fix the problem with this setup? I 
> don't know what kind of graphics card you have, but with NVidia cards 
> you can enable the second screen (be it a TV or another monitor) in a 
> so-called TwinView mode. The second screen can be a part of your main 
> screen, or it can be at the left/top/bottom/right of it, not 
> necessarily connected to the main screen and not necessarily aligned to 
> it at the edges. I think Xinerama can also do this, but that never 
> worked for me correctly in KDE3, while the NVidia mode works. 
> In my case it was defined to be at right, aligned to the right edge, and 
> the top of both screens are also aligned. So I have big screen 
> (1600x1200) and a smaller one (800x600). In KDE3 with this setup the 
> two screens were completely independent. Kicker was only on the first 
> screen, and also the background image did not flow through the screens, 
> but there was one background image on each one (scaled to the 
> corresponding resolution). This setup was handy, as I could work on the 
> main screen without taking care of the other (the only problem was that 
> I could drag any window there), while when I started to movie, I could 
> move it to the second screen and make it full screen there.

Thats pretty similar to what you get when you setup Xorg with 2 screens
and disable Xinerama, 2 independant desktops. Which I think explains:

>  With KDE4, I didn't check what was on the second screen as I usually 
> don't have the TV turned on when I work, or if it is, my wife is 
> watching it (like now). :) But on the main screen nothing was unusual, 
> the panel had the right size, the toolbox in the top-right corner 
> appeared correctly,

Why you didn't see a too-large-panel or the wrong Toolbox, this stuff
apparently only happens with Xinerama setups.

Andreas

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