DMA

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 23 May 2006 16:51, Shawn McMahon wrote:
> On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 12:34:02AM +1000, Alexander Jacob Tsykin 
said:
> > Ubuntu has progressed a lot in terms of ease of use, but it is
> > not there yet. There is still a long way to go before it can even
> > begin to compare to the ease of installation that Microsoft
> > features.
>
> I just recently installed a second monitor, and this is one of the
> best examples I've found yet.

To be fair, the possibilities with two monitors on X11 are several. Do 
you want:

1. Two displays with one screen each?
2. One display with two screens?
3. One big desktop that spans two monitors?
4. If resolutions differ, what to do with dead space?
5. Dual-head card, or two cards?
6. Different virtual desktops on each monitor?
7. If you have one big desktop, should the panel stretch across both, 
or be constrained to one monitor? If so, which one?
8. Should centered dialogs appear in the middle of a double-sized 
desktop, or centered on one monitor?

Suddenly, a config utility goes from apparently easy to mind-numbingly 
complex - probably the underlying reason it hasn't really been done. 
The problem gets even worse when the machine is a notebook and the 
second monitor may or may not be connected when X starts.

> On Ubuntu, to enable Xinerama, I have to edit a configuration file
> by hand, adding lots of stuff to it.  I have to bounce gdm manually
> each time, or reboot.  If I'm lucky it will work.  I didn't have
> enough time yesterday to futz with it, so it doesn't work yet, so
> although I'm confident it will, I can't state unequivocally that it
> does.  The documentation is practically non-existent, and as I
> always do with Ubuntu, I used Google to find it because the search
> tools on the Ubuntu website are useless.

I share your pain - been there done that

> On Windows, I right-clicked the desktop, selected the "Settings"
> tab, and clicked a clearly-labelled box.

The down side is that of the many possibilities you might want, MS (or 
the driver vendor) sees fit to let you use only one. In Linux, I can 
start one X server on the primary monitor running KDE and a second X 
server on the secondary monitor running e17. This lets me go wild 
with e (still cranky & unstable at the best of times) while keeping 
important apps (browser, mail, etc) open and unaffected when e needs 
to be bounced. Try that on Windows.

So this is an unusual config, but the point is that I CAN do it. My OS 
vendor doesn't make it easy, but they also don't rob me of the full 
potential of the hardware. The trade-off is having to deal with 
xorg.conf....

I don't see this changing soon, given xorg's architecture. If it ever 
becomes fully modularized where drivers can be plugged in and out at 
runtime like the kernel, then easy config tools will be a reality. 
Maybe v7.x will do this, maybe not.

-- 
If only me, you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five