Re: Multiple Displays

[Gordon Messmer <yinyang eburg com>]

On Sat, 7 Oct 2000, Jason Stokes wrote:

> Can't you assign a virtual desktop to each of your two displays?  Then
> Gnome will take advantage of your displays automatically as part of its
> support for virtual desktops.

No, not as far as I know.  If I'm wrong on any of the following points,
please, please tell me.  ;)

GNOME doesn't really support multiple desktops / virtual desktops.  That's
the window manager's job.  E did this, but I don't recall if E helped
GNOME play nice with multiple desktops.  Sawfish does not yet support
multihead X configurations.

In order for GNOME to be happy on multihead configurations, one of two
things must be true:

You should be able to run multiple gnome-sessions, each on a different
display, concurrently.  The problem with this solution is lack of
communication.  When you log out of your primary gnome session, the other
will be abruptly disconnected from its separate X display.  Session
management on that display is shot to hell.

Alternatively, at least gnome-session, the panel, and the window manager
must be multihead aware.  gnome-session should be able to save state for
multiple, separate displays and properly restore them.  The panel should
be able to run separate, concurrent sessions with configurations related
to the gnome session id, so that you can launch applications on displays
other than the first.  The window manager should behave similarly.  This
solution could tie GNOME to X too closely if it's not implemented right.

It's sort of a bitch that neither GNOME nor KDE properly supports
multihead.  Does anyone know whether the core GNOME developers has a plan
for fixing this situation?  Has it been made an issue?

MSG