I've just set up a dual head system (Matrox G450, RHL8.0, Metacity, Xinerama) and I don't find it comfortable. Why? I sit with one screen in front of me, and one off to the side. Since they are 21 inch monitors, it would be awkward to sit in front of both. Besides, when they are placed close together there seems to be magnetic interference between them. I'd like to have most stuff happen on my main monitor, but be able to drag widows to the other monitor. I don't know how to make this happen. I can think of two ways, neither of which work. 1) Don't use Xinerama. Then the two screens become different devices (i.e. DISPLAY=:0.0 for one and DISPLAY=:0.1 for the other). The fundamental problem is that you cannot drag a window between devices, as far as I know. 2) Use Xinerama. The two screens act as if they are one. This just doesn't match my reality (me, the human part of the system). The most problematic feature of metacity is that its logic always seems to create new windows on the screen I'm not using. In fact, it creates them on the far end of the screen I'm not using. The second approach looks to me (not an X programmer) easier to fix. I'd like to be able to tell Metacity to create windows in my primary screen. I would guess that programming this would be easy; a suitably general design would be needed. An even better approach, based on (2), would be if the two screens could be used to show separate workspaces. I have no idea if this fits the structure of the X code. I don't really understand the code in metacity's src/place.c, but that seems to be where the placement decisions get made. Short of hacking the code, there does not seem to be any way of constraining the placement to one screen. It looks as if the exact wrong screen is picked each time because it is emptier. The far side of the wrong screen is probably picked because it works left to right and my wrong screen is on the left. I found the following patch for WindowMaker that might satisfy my requirements. I've not tried it. <https://windowmaker.org/lists/archive/wm-user/wm-user05819.shtml> Hugh Redelmeier hugh@mimosa.com voice: +1 416 482-8253 -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
