GSoC : Multiscreen management

[Björn Ruberg]

Hello,

I fully agree with Detlev's points. The multiscreen management is very bad in 
KDE currently, although in KDE 4.4 it is a little better than in KDE 4.3. 
Every time I want to plug a beamer to my laptop in university I have to fight 
up to one minute getting every thing correct - and the other students using 
MacOS or Windows laugh at me. KDE and Linux makes no good impression 
concerning multi screens - and that is no "special" feature but one that is 
much needed everywhere and everyday.

The problem for me is not the intel-driver. I can get everything as I want 
with xrandr. It is a interface problem!

I wrote some mails about this on kde-devel half a year ago and wanted to do a 
plasmoid myself. Sadly I have not the free time to do such a project on my own 
as long the underlying libarys are not in better shape. My own screen 
management plasmoid is here:
http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/plasma/applets/screen_control/
Add this to Wills list of related work :)

It uses Kephal just for reading in data - for actually changing anything it 
makes command line calls to xrandr. That may sound ugly but it works - at 
least it works much better than kephal does in changing screen configuration.

If Kephal would not only be useable for finding out your screen configuration 
but could actually change it, I'm quite confident I would bring this applet in 
a good and working shape. So, it would be great if Kephal could become a GSOC 
project. Even if proprietary nvidia drivers would not work (what may be worked 
around by an abstraction layer) it would be a great improvement. In the 
current state you have no good time with multiple screens in KDE with any 
driver you can use.