[ubuntu-x] [Gutsy] Should Xinerama be active when only a single monitor is connected?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 11:08:22AM +0000, Dan Munckton wrote:
> Should Xinerama really be active for only 1 screen by default in Gutsy?
> Is this the correct behaviour or have I found a bug?

In general, Xinerama is being deprecated upstream - it's going to be
going away entirely.  Some remanants of it still exist in Gutsy, and
it's still used by some of the lesser drivers, but it can't even be
configured for -intel, -ati, and (some) -nv.  So, in general Xinerama
shouldn't be active at all.

However, as the underlying infrastructure gets reimplemented for Xrandr
instead of Xinerama, I could easily imagine the call behavior changes.
My initial guess would be that the call that reports Xinerama as active
got replaced with Xrandr backend guts, which *is* active even for one
screen.

> If this is correct what would the consequences be of disabling it? Are
> there any applications that now rely on this e.g. DisplayConfigGTK?

If it truly is Xinerama, and not Xrandr in disguise, then there should
be no consequences to disabling it.  However, if my suspicion is correct
and that it's actually Xrandr underneath, then this won't be possible;
the Java code will need to be updated to allow for this new behavior.

Bryce