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llawwehttam

Member

From: United Kingdom

Registered: 2010-01-19

Posts: 181

[SOLVED]Openbox + Nvidia Twinview - Can't enable second monitor.

I have just left gnome for openbox and am loving it. I have had very few issues so far, none of which a quick google couldn't fix. However I have hit a brick wall with this.

I have a monitor that I share between two machines and I only enable it when I need it.

I used to do this with the nvidia settings manager in gnome as I could just select the second monitor and enable it using twinview. However if I do that with openbox the screen garbles and even after the timout ends the screen does not revert so I have to go to a tty and restart X.

I have noticed when the screen garbles that I can see a bit of the slim default login page...... but I don't know if that's relevant.

I have tried this with and without cairocompmgr enabled.

Has anyone got any ideas?

Last edited by llawwehttam (2011-01-02 02:40:19)

SS4

Member

From: !Rochford, Essex

Registered: 2010-12-05

Posts: 699

Re: [SOLVED]Openbox + Nvidia Twinview - Can't enable second monitor.

Have you tried using lxrandr to add the other monitor?

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BurntSushi

Member

From: Massachusetts

Registered: 2009-06-28

Posts: 362

Website

Re: [SOLVED]Openbox + Nvidia Twinview - Can't enable second monitor.

If he's using nvidia, xrandr probably isn't going to be of much use. (Unfortunately... :-()

Check out disper. It's in the AUR. Connect your second monitor and run:

disper -l

It should list all attached monitors. You can enable both like so:

disper -d MON-1,MON-2 -t "left" -e

Change "MON-1" and "MON-2" to correspond to the names of the monitors output in the first command, and modify the other options as you see fit. The disper --help should be fairly straight-forward.

Last edited by BurntSushi (2010-12-31 21:33:01)

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llawwehttam

Member

From: United Kingdom

Registered: 2010-01-19

Posts: 181

Re: [SOLVED]Openbox + Nvidia Twinview - Can't enable second monitor.

If he's using nvidia, xrandr probably isn't going to be of much use. (Unfortunately... :-()

Check out disper. It's in the AUR. Connect your second monitor and run:

disper -l

It should list all attached monitors. You can enable both like so:

disper -d MON-1,MON-2 -t "left" -e

Change "MON-1" and "MON-2" to correspond to the names of the monitors output in the first command, and modify the other options as you see fit. The disper --help should be fairly straight-forward.

Great program there mate. I'll use that in future.

Sadly it didn't fix the issue and has the same problems as the Nvidia Xserver settings tool.

The second it enables the second monitor the display garbles, a bit when you get a non responsive window and when you drag it about it leaves trails on the screen.

However the mouse is still active and non-distorted and when I move it over an area on the screen (which is completely distorted) where a terminal is the cursor changes to the insert cursor as normal......... except everything is distorted.

But......... I found the cause of the problem.

Its not openbox being fussy. I am using cairo-compmgr and it doesn't like resizing. I disabled it, resized and its now working a treat!

Thanks for the help anyway, and that's a very useful tool BurntSushi, thanks.