GSoC : Multiscreen management

[Will Stephenson]

On Thursday 01 April 2010 20:07:14 Chani wrote:
> On April 1, 2010 09:40:12 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
> 
> I have *very* little experience with multiscreen, but... how much of this
> is a distro or driver thing? 

Distro/driver is not important; the multiscreen features discussed above are 
simply missing even with a perfect driver/distro combination.

> when I plugged my tv into my laptop running
> arch, the video seemed to Just Work - I opened up krandr, set the new
> screen to the first resolution and there it was. later I thought maybe I
> wanted the other screen on top, so I tried that, and it worked too.
> 
> when I tried the netbook reference thing, though, it didn't really want to
> obey the settings I chose. it just wanted to clone the laptop screen onto
> the tv screen. weird stuff happened as I fought with it... :/
> 
> I'm not saying multiscreen is in a *good* state, just that I had two very
> different experiences on different distros.

The intel driver can cause this behaviour, since contemporary releases of 
different distros ship different X servers *and* different intel drivers, and 
intel's feature set varies from release to release.  The intel driver in the 
openSUSE 11.2 build of Plasma Netbook Reference Platform is especially bad at 
detecting the correct native monitor resolution from the EDID.

Will