GSoC Idea: better multi-head support

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 22 March 2008, Aike J Sommer wrote:
> It was actually kinda easy to make it "seem" like the 2 monitors have
> indpendent virtual desktops... It basically works by having n*m virtual
> desktops and remapping the windows depending on the monitor they r
> currently on and the selected desktop!
> The plus is: it can be done by a simple app listening to windowing-events,
> having a pager that "understands" this would be a plus of course!! ;-)
> The downside: its a hack ;-) and there is slight flicker when the window is
> remapped!

personally i don't really see the point of this other than "cool hack". it 
sounds like a more complex set of concepts with more code paths to deal with 
for a win of ..? (and this code would belong in kwin, of course)

> - desktop background does not extend to both screens, i had 2 different
> results:

of course the desktop background is not supposed to extend to both screens. 
each screen gets its own Containment, and therefore its own background.

>   - it would stay at 1400x1050 but move to the smaller external screen,
> resulting in a 376 pixel wide strip of the wallpaper on the left of the
> internal screen
>   - it would resize to 1024x768 and move to the external screen, this would
> then leave a 376 pixel wide strip of grey and white squares on the internal
> screen

did you ./apply_patches in qt-copy? because without patch 0172, there is no 
hope of this working with xrandr 1.2. if your qt does have patch 0172 applied 
then this is problematic and would need to be debugged.

the code path is something like:

Corona gets the screen resized(int) signal from QApplication::desktop(). it 
finds the current Containment associated the screen and notifies it of this; 
that should result in the resizing of the Containment (and, if necessary, the 
repositioning of it on the canvas), which then emits its geometryChanged() 
signal, cahsing the View to adjust what it is looking at on the Corona.

some of this code is pretty new and it hasn't been thoroughly tested yet.

(btw: good news, 0172 has been applied upstream)

> - the rest of the background would be grey in both cases and doesnt respond
> to clicks with the rmb

yes, that would be the Corona showing through.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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