Dual Monitor Mess Up.

[ricomoss]

Ladies and gentlemen of the Kubuntu forums, I may have done something very silly. I'm really not sure where this question should be posted as I'm not sure as to the root problem. Here is what happened.

I have a dual monitor setup but have never been able to implement it correctly. Every time I boot my computer it defaults to a single monitor (the right monitor). Once I log in I simply go to nvidia-settings and activate the second monitor and everything is fine.

Well, this was all great until I decided to move all my application windows and the task manager to the left monitor during the upgrade to Natty 11.04. I believe I set the left monitor to be the default monitor too (can't remember for sure if I did this).

Once the upgrade was complete the computer needed to be restarted. Now when I log in I only see the right monitor with no applications or task manager. If I press alt-tab I can see the console windows are open but am unable to see them. I can type commands in them (it's how I've been rebooting the machine).

Does anyone have any idea how I can move these windows back to the right monitor without being able to see them or click on them with a mouse? I tried to boot the computer in recovery mode with safe graphics and I get an xserver disconnect failure - but the failure flashes by so fast I can't read what it says...I tried taking a picture of it but it's just so fast the camera can't focus long enough to get a non-blurry picture.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can fix this problem?

[ricomoss]

Re: Dual Monitor Mess Up.

I've been working on this for some time now and am not entirely convinced what the underlying issue is. It may not be the case the applications/task manager are on the "second monitor" but rather aren't showing up properly.

If I alt-tab to an application and alt-F3 > Move I can move the window to a location on the "first monitor" but it doesn't seem to show up there. Does that make any sense?

Also, if I Right Click > Add Panel > Default Panel a strange animation sometimes happens (about 40% of the time) on the right portion of the "first monitor" as if something is being minimized but there is nothing there. Much like Predator "disappears"...I don't know how to describe it.

Any suggestions?

[oshunluvr]

Re: Dual Monitor Mess Up.

If it were me, I'd work on the dual monitor issue first. How were/are you trying to get both displays up?

I'm assuming you've successfully installed the nvidia driver and it's activated.

The first way to attempt dual screens is running nvidia-settings as root so you can save the results to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Another method is to use xrandr and save the commands to either /etc/X11/Xsession or /etc/rc.local.

I have dual monitors and dual 8800gt cards - I have attached a copy of my xorg.conf (with the second card removed). I had t add .txt to it to attach it so just rename it back to xorg.conf. You can try it and see if it works. If you have issues with it, just delete it and restart X.

Some tips on restarting X without rebooting:

From the graphical desktop, press Ctrl+ALT+F1 to bring you to the terminal or console mode.
To re-start the graphics system, the command is sudo service kdm restart
You can also use stop and start with this command