Dual head / mgp / general x geometry question...

[sa]

Under KDE3 this was a fairly straightforward matter...

I have a laptop I wish to use for presentations. For presenting I use magicpoint. For sorting out the screen / resolutions etc when I plug in the second screen / projector I use nvidia-settings to configure my desktop as one big screen. I then position the magicpoint presentation on the projector (and not my laptop screen) using the X11 geometry settings. Since my laptop sports a 1280x800 screen and I configure the second screen to be left of the primary I would use mgp -g 640x480+1280+0 (where 640x480 is the resolution of the second screen).

Now you would think this would work under lucid / kde4 but it doesn't. Using xeyes rather than mgp (since this is universal and mgp is less likely to be installed): xeyes -geometry 200x100+100+100 works fine, but any x-position >1080 (ie where xeyes would need to straddle the screens) results in xeyes being remapped to the primary screen at 1080. Any x-position >1279 results in the window manager placing xeyes somewhere in the primary screen.

Does anyone know how I can get my presentation back onto the second screen / projector?

I can drag it there using alt+left mouse button but this isn't a brilliant solution. Worse still I use mgp to
launch mplayer animations over mgp as part of the presentation and I need to use the xgeometry setting to place these and this is remapped as above my animations / movies do not appear (and cannot be dragged).

Any ideas?

SA



I presume this is a KDE4 thing

[sa]

Re: Dual head / mgp / general x geometry question...

I have found a less than satisfactory way around this - use nvidiasettings to map the 2nd display as a subsection of the first then use the geometry commands to place mgp etc in the first display. This isn't ideal but works at a push, however, it reveals another problem - also new since kde4:

When a movie starts on the 2nd display the 2nd screen blanks for 3-4 seconds before working and the same happens after the movie finishes. During a presentation this is awful. On one projector the projecter reported looking for the signal during the blanks. The laptop screen displays the presentaion and movies as it should with no glitches or blanks.

[sa]

Re: Dual head / mgp / general x geometry question...

The blank screen on video playback occurs for mplayer and xine but not for kaffiene which is puzzling.

Unfortunately kaffiene doesn't provide an easy way to display a non full screen borderless controlless video window...

[sa]

Re: Dual head / mgp / general x geometry question...

I have also tried configuring the display as two separate x displays with the extrernal screen on :0.1.

This way I can set the geometry correctly (relative to the second screen) but I still suffer from video playback issues:

mplayer - 3-4 second delay with a screen blank (ie the screen switches off)

xine - simply crashes (BadAtom)

kaffeine - runs but detaches from the shell and is uncontrollable.

[sa]

Re: Dual head / mgp / general x geometry question...

This simply all works in kde3 provided krandr is killed off

[sa]

Re: Dual head / mgp / general x geometry question...

Actually that was a fluke - I don't know what is going on but it isn't simply fixed for kde3.

The best I have is that for kde3 or kde4 if I try mplayer -vo gl ... which crashes then any video application afterwards runs just fine (mplayer xine or kaffeine) without the blanks. If I log out of kde and back in again regardless of which flavour it stops working.

I have no idea what the problem is or where it lies but logging in or out of kde starts it up again.

Any suggestions as to where to post this?