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Linux multimonitor and different workspaces

I just retired my old desktop pc and decided to use the free monitor to do “dual monitoring” with my laptop (again).

While it’s really nice how you can arrange and use the second monitor, it’s not as good as I’d like it to be. ;-)

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the choice to use the same functionality like workspaces offer with the second monitor?

Currently you can clone the desktop (which is only useful when you close the laptop and just work on the 2nd monitor or you want to use a beamer or you use the xinerama functioality to expand the virtual screen size. This leads to several problems when both monitors are not build for the same screen resolution.

So, what do I mean by “using the 2nd monitor with workspace functionality”? (BTW: I’m speaking for Ubuntu-Gnome UI here, different windowmanagers would look different of course)

What I’d like to have is something like this:

  • independent screen resolution setting without effect on the other screen
  • second monitor gets (if wished) his own top “start menu”
  • second monitor get’s his own workspace configuration
  • the workspaces on the first monitor don’t appear on the second monitor and vice versa (although it would be nice to be able to “send” workspace A to monitor C)
  • possibility to move programs from one screen to next in the same way as you move it to different workspaces

You can think of some more things you might like for this. So I’d like the second monitor to be a “first class citizen”. I think that this would be a great addition to current XServers/window managers (not sure if current X would support this without changes).

Important is that it’s not an independent X session on the second monitor. You need to have the chance to move programs between the two monitors, the rest should be fairly isolated from the other monitors.

So if anybody knows how to setup something like this or just thinks that this is a good idea, please add a short comment.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 09:40 and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Linux multimonitor and different workspaces”

  1. James Lochhead on February 16th, 2009 at 01:55

    I have multiple monitors set up with all those features except that it happens to be an independent X session. Since you mention it I am assuming you already know how to set things up like this.

    According to this thread:

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=985862

    Moving applications between monitors is not currently possible.

    That leaves TwinView and Xinerama. I don’t think you can do any of those bullet points of them (not sure).

    I think your best bet would be to do the independent x sessions. It is not really too annoying.

    Oh, and I do think your idea is a good one. It might be quite complicated to implement though, and not gain much support since those of us who use more than one screen are a minority.

  2. Hi James,
    thanks for your feedback!
    Currently I have set up my displays as dualscreen, so I have some points of my list covered, but what is IMHO really annpying is that there is no way of communicating for applications from on screen to the next.

    For example, Thunderbird on the left and FF on the right, when I click on a link in TB it complains that FF is running because it tries to start a new one and the profile is locked.

    I don’t know the X internal well enough to know how hard it is to have inter-X communication and application window ability to jump from one screen to the next, but I think it may be a big improvement to get more coverage for linux in the desktops, especially in the businessworld, where two monitors per computer are very common.

    We’ll see is someone from the X-Devs will finally decide to implement stuff like this.