Status of multi-monitor support

[Aike J Sommer]

Am Donnerstag 09 Oktober 2008 20:45:47 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> On Thursday 09 October 2008, Aike J Sommer wrote:
> > Im not really sure what the next steps should be. It shouldnt be that
> > much work to get kephals signals hooked into plasma, but where should i
> > start with that? Create a copy of plasma(-the-app) in playground? Or only
> > work locally and send diffs to the list?
>
> can we possibly just work on the shell directly in kdebase? i guess that
> depends on how risky it all is ...

Shouldnt be risky at all... Other than it being new and pretty much untested 
code!
I'll have to disable polling though, that seems to not play nice at least with 
ati-chips.

> > Plus im really not gifted with creating good looking interfaces, which
> > heavily effects the applet! ;-)
>
> 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.

Currently it tries to layout the monitors, so without being able to define how 
you want that to happen chances are you end up with screens on the wrong side 
of each other...
I could change that behaviour, so that it wont interfere with peoples "manual" 
xrandr positioning...

>
> "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.

Yes.. If xrandr 1.2 is not available it will fall back to using 
QDesktopWidget, thus having the same information as its used already by 
plasma!

:-)