DMA

[Shawn McMahon]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 03:23:24AM +0200, Alan McKinnon said:
> 
> To be fair, the possibilities with two monitors on X11 are several. Do 
> you want:

So, if some people might want to enable special features, we shouldn't
even support the majority case?  Come on.

Hell, we do what Windows does during the boot; show one display with two
screens.  But as soon as GDM starts up the Nvidia module, blammo; one
screen, one display.

Don't want to make the GUI support all the possible options?  Fine.  But
to not have it even be able to stick the couple of lines in there that
are necessary and sufficent to at least make both monitors active
because it would be hard to support EVERYTHING is ridiculous.  Not
putting it in there because it's not a priority because most users don't
have two monitors, I can understand; but that doesn't appear to me to be
the position you're taking.  Apologies if I am misunderstanding what you
meant.

> 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 

No, it DEFAULTS to one, and has checkboxes and dropdowns etc. to support
all of the others.  Although Microsoft didn't write them; Nvidia did.  I
have no problem with us saying in the short term "if you want chocolate
or strawberry, whip out vi and have at it".  My problem is with us
saying "if you want vanilla, grandma, either learn vi or shut up and
boot back into Windows."  That's the exact sort of thing I thought Mark
was trying to get away from when he forked this project.

I submit that the vast majority of computer users who might possibly try
Ubuntu and who happen to have two monitors hooked up would be very happy
if Ubuntu came up automatically in "TwinView", I.E. one double-wide
desktop spanning two screens, and would accept having to run a
"TwinView" application and enable it.  Being able to mess with other
options from the GUI would be nice, but the majority case just want
something on the other monitor that's not a black screen and that's not
the same stuff that's on the first one.  Multiple backgrounds and other
such frippery are optional for now.

As for laptops; I think we could also detect whether there's a monitor
there for most modern hardware, and not put the panel there if there
isn't one during installation.  Most of the time we're detecting
displays anyway.  My TwinView setup doesn't even have an entry for the
other screen, and it's a pretty old monitor; it just works, once that
'Option "TwinView" "1"' is in there.  But we're well outside my
knowledge of the code now, so I could very well be wrong.  Obviously it
needs to do something rational in almost every case, or people won't
be able to install.  It's non-trivial, I get that.


-- 
   Shawn McMahon    | "I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
   EIV Consulting   | And now that I have some light, I can see the
 http://www.eiv.com | tunnel needs painting too." - Steve Jackson
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/sounder/attachments/20060524/264e8d93/attachment.pgp