[Discuss] NVidia 2 screen problem

David Kramer david at thekramers.net
Tue Sep 10 22:40:04 EDT 2013


My main machine (wopr, running Kubuntu 12.04) has a normal monitor and a
TV hooked up to my nVidia card.  For a long time I've been
mostly-successfully running the two screens in separate X sessions,
because I want to be able to run mythfrontend maximized on my TV, and
sometimes other programs.  I say mostly working, because I've ALWAYS had
the following problems:
- Obviously I can't move apps from one screen to another.  That would be
cool but I understand why it doesn't work
- No matter what I do, some apps refuse to appear on the TV.  No matter
how I launch them or what I set $DISPLAY to, they always come up on my
monitor instead of my TV.

A few days ago, I experienced a problem where everything was working as
before, but no windows on the TV could get keyboard input.  I can work
them with the mouse, but not the keyboard.  That prevents me from doing
things like exiting mythfrontend :)  I tried a few things but browsers,
terminals, and editors would launch on the TV but never got keyboard
input.  All keyboard input went to whatever app had focus on my monitor.
Looking at the logs I see no problems with the keyboard.

In desperation, I changed my nVidia settings to use TwinView.  I could
then move windows between screens which was nice, but:
- Switching desktops switched both screens, so if I was watching
mythfrontend on the TV and wanted to switch to another desktop on my
monitor, the TV would switch away from mythfrontend too.  In order to
fix that, I then had to configure mythfrontend to run in a window
slightly smaller than the screen so I could get window decorations so I
could then tell it to appear on all desktops, but it looked like crap
not being full screen, and it was a lot of work to set that up each time
- When I would launch new windows on my monitor, they would often appear
on the TV.  This is especially true of new Chrome windows.  The problem
here is when I'm not watching mythfrontend. my TV is usually turned off,
so I don't see those windows.  I could not find a way to tell the app or
X to stay on the one screen.

I thought I would retry separate X sessions again, so in the nVidia
config program I set it up the way it used to be,  I still had the
lack-of-keyboard problem, but now X doesn't come up when I start the
computer up.  I have to run startx.  I know where the default runlevel
USED to be stored, but now there's all that poorly-documented event
driven crap I have no idea how to fix this.

I'm willing to go in either direction (TwinView or separate X sessions)
if the problems with them can be fixed (no keyboard, and new windows
going to my TV, respectively).    Any ideas?

Thanks.

Log file, configured with separate X sessions: http://pastebin.com/QZN8qjZm

My xorg.conf for TwinView: http://pastebin.com/JQV0xc4D

My xorg.conf for separate monitors: http://pastebin.com/gy6DHXn6



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