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TwinView with Xorg and ion3

Ok, I was expecting a problem when I recently hooked up a second display to my machine. I knew that ion3 had dropped xinerama-support, and that without xinerama you’d get two seperate X-displays which could even run different window-managers but not allow for moving windows in-between. What I had totally forgotten (haven’t used two displays for a long time) was that there is TwinView. With TwinView the X-Server just sees one big screen (in my case 3200×1200) and so there are almost no problems. But wait, you might say, what about windows which stretch across the screen, doesn’t that look stupid. Sure, but I totally forgot that with ion3 you can just tile your workspace vertically and it is tiled exactly in the middle. Problem solved! Ok, if you hit ‘f’ in mplayer it maximizes to both screens (which in most cases is unwanted), but if you have one workspace which just has a “fullscreen” frame on one display you can just attach programs like mplayer to those windows. In case you’re wondering, here is how your xorg.conf should look:
Section "Device"
Identifier "geforce"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "DPMS"
Option "NoLogo"
Option "TwinView"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP,DFP"
Option "MetaModes" "1600x1200,1600x1200"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "RightOf"
EndSection
Your mileage may vary. By the way: nobody really needs this much screen space ;)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 22:23 and is filed under Geekstuff, Gentoo, Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “TwinView with Xorg and ion3”

  1. Of course you need so much Space. Everytime when I’m sitting at home in WK in front of my old CRT with just 1280×1024 I really miss my 3200×1200 (1920×1200 + 1280×1024) Desktop :-) I think that dual-screen is a very important thing for efficent coding :)

  2. The main problem I have with this approach is that you don’t get separate bindings to cycle through the tiles in one workspace (Mod+Tab by default, I think) and a keybinding to switch between workspaces. I tend to just use my second monitor for miscellany so I’d rather not have it in my tab cycle :)

  3. Me! Me! I always need my 3200×1200 pixels! And I use xmonad :)

    BTW: Your Anti-Spam is German?!

    Bye,
    Carsten

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