Status of multi-monitor support

[Guillaume Pothier]

2008/10/9 Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org>:
> how much is the applet required to make kephal useful for plasma? can kephal
> be used as just a notifier of screen layouts, or does it also need to manage
> them? if it can be used as just a notifier (what we have now with
> QDesktopWidget, right?) then perhaps we can start there and add control to it
> later with a nice pretty widget.

If my understanding is correct, technically kephal can run
independantly of the applet and notify plasma about screen
configuration changes. However, it cannot guess the monitor layout,
ie. monitor 1 above, below, left or right of monitor 2, or if you want
to have an extended desktop or clone the desktop on the other monitor.
So the the applet seems quite indispensable to me.

Another topic: kephal remembers the configuration of each monitor, eg.
you plug your external monitor into your notebook and configure it to
be on the left of the internal monitor; later you plug in a projector
and configure it as clone of the internal monitor. Kephal remembers
all that so when you plug back your external monitor, kephal remembers
that this monitor was configured to be on the left (Aike, tell me if
I'm wrong). What happens with plasma in this regard? For instance, I
have one small external monitor at work, and a bigger one at home. I
like to have the plasmoids organized in some way on the big monitor,
and in another way on the small monitor. Would plasma remember the
plasmoid layout for each desktop size? If not, given that kephal
already manage per-monitor-setup configurations, could plasma (and
maybe other apps) store per-monitor-setup configuration data along
with kephal's?

Cheers,
g

>
> "later" might still be soon enough to make it into 4.2.0, or it might not.
>
>> And: What would be needed for a 4.2 release? I still havent gotten around
>> to creating a kcm-module
>
> i guess my question about about control vs notification comes into play here as
> well
>
>> and legacy xinerama is missing too! (theres always
>> the QDesktopWidget-fallback, so it really shouldnt make things worse)
>
> by "there's always the QDesktopWidget-fallback" do you mean that internally
> kephal falls back to using QDesktopWidget? if so .. then improving legacy
> xinerama (by replacing QDesktopWidget in that case) is something that can
> happy later, as it won't cause any further regressions over what we currently
> deal with.
>
> --
> 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 Qt Software
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Plasma-devel mailing list
> Plasma-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
>
>