Any news on using cinnamon with separate x screens?

[gotjazz]

Hey everyone,

am I the only one still using separate X Screens? After years of fiddling around back in the "good ol'" gnome 2 days, I finally found a layout I liked, which allowed me to use two screens, which are not both all the time connected but sometimes come together and which worked with fullscreen applications too.

This was great until gnome 3 came along. Now Gnome 3 doesn't seem to have any interest to work with separate X Screens but wants you to use randr or xinerama or an exteded desktop or whatever. That made me an XFCE fugitive.
But XFCE is starting to look somewhat old and I really enjoy using Cinnamon on a single screen (when the second monitor isn't plugged in that is) - it doesn't seem to work with separate X Screens though (crashes on log-in).

Now I just thought I'd pop in to ask if there's a plan to change that now that Cinnamon is completely separated from GNome 3.

I'm running Arch with Cinnamon 2 and a very basic xorg.conf

Code: Select all

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier     "amdcccle Layout"
	Screen      0  "amdcccle-Screen[1]-0" 1280 0
	Screen         "amdcccle-Screen[1]-1" 0 0
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "0-DFP5"
	Option	    "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
	Option	    "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
	Option	    "DPMS" "true"
	Option	    "TargetRefresh" "60"
	Option	    "Position" "0 0"
	Option	    "Rotate" "normal"
	Option	    "Disable" "false"
	Option	    "PreferredMode" "1280x720"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "0-DFP7"
	Option	    "VendorName" "ATI Proprietary Driver"
	Option	    "ModelName" "Generic Autodetecting Monitor"
	Option	    "DPMS" "true"
	Option	    "PreferredMode" "1280x1024"
	Option	    "TargetRefresh" "60"
	Option	    "Position" "0 0"
	Option	    "Rotate" "normal"
	Option	    "Disable" "false"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "amdcccle-Device[1]-0"
	Driver      "fglrx"
	Option	    "Monitor-DFP7" "0-DFP7"
	BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Identifier  "amdcccle-Device[1]-1"
	Driver      "fglrx"
	Option	    "Monitor-DFP5" "0-DFP5"
	BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
	Screen      1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "amdcccle-Screen[1]-0"
	Device     "amdcccle-Device[1]-0"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
	EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
	Identifier "amdcccle-Screen[1]-1"
	Device     "amdcccle-Device[1]-1"
	DefaultDepth     24
	SubSection "Display"
		Viewport   0 0
		Depth     24
	EndSubSection
EndSection

So a 4:3 display that's always plugged in on the right as primary display and a TV which is plugged in when using XBMC on the left.
Now I love XBMC and it's pretty much the main reason I need separate X screens because it just needs to have one to itself in fullscreen. (and also my tv has some weird asymetrical over-/underscan issues which are easier to compensate that way)

I can'T be the only one, can I?

[gotjazz]

oh - seems it's fixed in gnome 3 - maybe the patch can be transferred?

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=648156 and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665061

[nykur]

You are NOT the only one, there are at least two of us I have exactly the same issue: Secondary monitor is a TV that is not always on, underscan issues (fixed mostly by tweaking xorg a little), to the left (just moved it to the right though) mostly used for XBMC.

Twinview is not an option, as sometimes windows open on the wrong monitor (which may be in use as a TV at the time) and stuff like tiling and snapping windows on the primary display become an issue, although it seems to work with Gnome 3.8.

I was using Fedora with Xfce but thougt I'd try out Mint with Cinnamon. But not supporting separate X screens is a showstopper for me. Another thing which I sort of need is a right click menu. Is this even possible with Cinnamon? Anyway, I second this feature request.

[gotjazz]

seems we're all alone in here

[iowabeakster]

Well I will dig this dead thread up, and give it a bump in the hopes that the right person(s) can make it happen. I'll help in any way I can, but I don't have the coding skills to even know where to start.

I too use separate Xscreens (and I really like cinnamon).

My google-foo has revealed plenty of other crashes (no solutions or any known working instances, in numerous Distros) with Cinnamon and more than 1 Xscreen.

I just downloaded and tried playing with Mint 17 RC, to see if I can use Mint on my "work" computer when the final version is released. And unfortunately Cinnamon still crashes when trying to start up with 2 Xscreens.

Hardware:
1 Nvidia GT430 card (running proprietary 337.12, beta)
2 Monitors (Dell 24" via DVI, HP 21" via VGA)

Software:
Fresh Mint 17 Cinnamon RC (released today)

Result:
Cinnamon crash on start-up.

Tried workarounds (installed mint-meta-mate, mint-meta-xfce) which did not crash on start-up, but had unfortunate bugs/side effects (panel issues and freezes in mate). XFCE was somewhat better, but at that point I might as well just dist-upgrade the Xubuntu install that computer has always ran, and works. I really would like to move it to Mint (particularly Cinnamon like the other computers in the house), but I've got to have separate Xscreens. I love Nemo (and hate Thunar). And running nautilus on XFCE (Xubuntu), is much better than years ago, but still far from ideal.

//hopes it can happen



---update


I wish I had some way of fixing the multiple of xscreen issue with Cinnamon, but I don't. But I did figure out a work around, so that I don't need to use multiple xscreens for my work. So that's good news for me (I should get to use Mint-Cinnamon on my work machine, YAY). I do have a bunch more testing to do though. But I don't foresee much else that'd go wrong (but then I didn't foresee a cinnamon crash from multiple xservers ).

[jacekrad]

I'm in a similar situation to you guys. My post is here http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 8&t=172013

I'm guessing that multi screen in xinerama is not something that cinnamon will support

[nykur]

I've come to accept this issue not being fixed, so I haven't even bothered to check with the latest version. I take it it's still broken? I'm actually quite happy to use Xfce on my desktop/TV box. It has a very low memory footprint and also makes it very easy to enable a right click menu which is the only thing I want on my TV monitor. I'm currently running Linux Mint 17 Xfce on said box, just did an apt upgrade from LM16 which went relatively nicely (a few hickups, nothing I couldn't handle).

I'll probably just use Xfce for my separate X screens then, but keep Cinnamon running nicely on my personal laptop. But I'll keep monitoring this thread in the unlikely event this bug (I'd say this classifies as a bug) gets fixed.

[BrianD]

[[...] But I'll keep monitoring this thread in the unlikely event this bug (I'd say this classifies as a bug) gets fixed.

It is a bug... and, actually exists in the Cinnamon bug tracker, but is flagged as "affects one user" (the person that submitted the bug), "low priority", and not currently assigned to any developer. If it stays like that, chances are slim that it'll ever bubble up to the top of some developer's to-do list.

I ran into the same thing... I had upgraded my ancient LM12/MGSE (yeah, yeah, I know...) installation to LM17/Cinnamon, and absolutely loved the new (to me) Cinnamon interface... so silky smooth and such... then, I bought a 24" HDTV for the computer room, and decided to set it up so that I could play movies, etc from my computer and display them on the HDMI input on the television. I had been using the built-in intel Sandy Bridge video on my motherboard, so I picked up an inexpensive NVIDIA GT-somethingorother to drive the HDMI input on the television... only to find out that my motherboard automatically disables/hides the built-in video if there's a video card installed. [sigh] so, I waited another couple days for a second NVIDIA GT-somethingorother to arrive. When it did, I installed both NVIDIA cards and discovered this issue (Cinnamon crashing on startup with more than 1 X screen configured). I ended up installing xfce (sudo apt-get install mint-meta-xfce) and choosing XFCE as the desktop environment on the login screen. Everything works just fine, exactly the way I wanted it to, except -- no Cinnamon. I'll get by, I suppose with xfce... but I really wish the Cinnamon devs would consider looking into this and getting multi-screen X configurations working on it-- even if one can't extend the desktop to the secondary (or tertiary, or whatever) monitor(s). I have no need for a twin-screen desktop, but I do have a need for a dual-monitor computer.