Running XFCE on my Ubuntu 9.10 X60
So, I decided that I hate the fact that I cannot pick 2 different wallpapers for my dual monitor set up at work. As trivial as it may seem to most people, I get pissed when I cannot fully customize software the way I want to. This is also the reason my Jailbroken iPhone.
Well, I have an Intel 945 chipset, a wide screen LCD, and I use my laptop LCD at the same time. I want two independent screens because mirroring is quite pointless. I like to use every last bit of screen real estate as possible. The XFCE desktop seems to provide no simple way to do this, like there was in Gnome. I used to just go into a settings manager, and tell it what I wanted it to do. Now I have to use some commands that I have not seen in a while. These commands are for XRandR.
To get it to do what I wanted it to do, I first ran this to see what the screens were capable of, and which what XRandR names them.
Now I see that the display labeled VGA is my wide screen LCD, and LVDS is my laptop’s LCD with its rather poor resolutions.
VGA connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 410mm x 256mm
1440x900 59.9 + 75.0 59.9
1280x1024 75.0 60.0
1280x960 60.0
1152x864 75.0
1024x768 75.0 70.1 60.0*
832x624 74.6
800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2
640x480 75.0 72.8 66.7 59.9
720x400 70.1
LVDS connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
1024x768 50.0 + 60.0 40.0
800x600 60.3
640x480 59.9
I picked the highest ones for each and make my dual display to stop mirroring by putting my laptop’s display to the right. You can do this to the left, top, or bottom if you prefer, so long as your card supports the total of the 2 combined resolutions.
Next, it is time for a little script to get this XRandR config to run using conditional statements for my wide screen LCD. This way, it will only run this config when I have it plugged in. I put the config file in /etc/X11/Xsession.d/
if [ "$?" -eq 0 ]; then
echo "hi"
# VGA connected
xrandr --output VGA --mode 1440x900 --output LVDS --mode 1024x768 --right-of VGA
else
xrandr --output LVDS --auto --output VGA --off
fi
That should do it… and it saved me from using the KDE desktop!
UPDATE: It works correctly now. My scripting was a little off.
Tags: 945, dual monitors, intel, linux, x60, xfce, xrandr, xubuntu
Eric B is a young, underpaid, mild mannered corporate whore. For more, see the About Page.
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