GSoC : Multiscreen management

[Detlev Casanova]

On Thursday 01 April 2010 18:40:12 Björn Ruberg wrote:
> 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.

Yes, I've had that problem.

> 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 :)

I'm not sure having multiple places where you can configure the same thing is a 
good idea. Also, I think that Plasma Widgets shouldn't be configuration 
interfaces. But it's only what I think, and people usually love widgets on 
theyr desktop :)

> 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.

Centralizing everything in on library (Kephal for instance), is IMHO a good 
idea. 

> So, it would be great if
> Kephal could become a GSOC project.

I think so too :-)

> 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.

It would be great to have something that works with friendly drivers first. 


Detlev.
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