Combining twinview and xinerama.

[netllama]

According to this bug report you're mixing X drivers (NVIDIA + RADEON). I'm not sure that I understand what you're trying to accomplish here.

-Lonni

[Thunderbird]

He wants a setup with twinview + the radeon in one X session. On the twinview 'screen' the desktop will be run and the radeon screen will be used for movie playback.

This can also be achieved by using two different X-servers but the problem with this is that each Xserver has its own VT. If you want to switch to the other Xserver the first one becomes inactive. (the keyboard can't be used for two VTs at the same time) For this reason he is using a different keyboard (actually none using a void driver) for the second Xserver and a different mouse (telephone). If all this would be in a single X-session this whole issue wouldn't appear.

Something else, have you tried synergy? I think it can be used to create what you want using two X-servers. One of the things synergy can do is sharing a single keyboard/mouse between multiple pcs. You can for instance configure it in a way that when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, that it will move over to another computer. I think it can also be used to share a keyboard/mouse between two X-servers. The VT issue might not appear but I don't know for sure.

[mrn]

thunderbird has it right, and no I haven't tried synergy, I'll look into that

It seems to me to be a bug in the driver though, if XineramaIsActive would return True on the twinview monitors when the radeon driver+tvout is enabled this would work very well. As XineramaQueryScreens has the needed data.

[AaronP]

Originally Posted by mrn

It seems to me to be a bug in the driver though, if XineramaIsActive would return True on the twinview monitors when the radeon driver+tvout is enabled this would work very well. As XineramaQueryScreens has the needed data.

When TwinView is active, the NVIDIA driver will provide its own implementation of the Xinerama extension. When the server's own Xinerama extension is active, it doesn't know about TwinView screens, and there's currently no way for the driver to tell it. Hopefully, a future X.org release will make what you want possible.

If what you want is TwinView (with "Xinerama" info) and a TV as a separate screen, just don't enable the X.org Xinerama extension.

[mrn]

Originally Posted by AaronP

When TwinView is active, the NVIDIA driver will provide its own implementation of the Xinerama extension. When the server's own Xinerama extension is active, it doesn't know about TwinView screens, and there's currently no way for the driver to tell it. Hopefully, a future X.org release will make what you want possible.

If what you want is TwinView (with "Xinerama" info) and a TV as a separate screen, just don't enable the X.org Xinerama extension.

That is exactly what I want, but when I set it up with twinview on monitor A and B, xinerama in xorg.conf disabled (I just realized it still says loading XINERAMA extension, is that because of twinview or is my Option "Xinerama" "false" not doing the trick?) I loose the xinerama information on monitor A and B, and it becomes one big display (still keeping the tv seperate, as I want).

As you can see from the test application I wrote, if I have normal twinview with monitor A and B on. XineramaIsActive returns true, if I add the ATI card on screen 1, not screwing with my xinerama configuration at all, XineramaIsActive returns false, but the information is still returned in XineramaQueryScreens.

[JTorrance]

Hi!

I ran into the same problem. I have an AGP GeForce and a PCI GeForce.
2 Monitors on the AGP card, with TwinView concatenated.
1 TV on the PCI card.
Gnome thinks the 2 monitors are one big screen, all gnome windows appear in the middle and the gnome-panel spans both monitors.
Sawfish respects the Xinerama info and windows get maximized on one monitor only.
I tried to enable twinview on the TV as well but it didn't make a difference.

So it seems like this:
If xinerama is active, there is only one big screen. If TwinView is active it disguises itself as xinerama. But with a second card, a second screen is added. Something that is probably not possible with real xinerama and therefore not expected.

The interesting part:
Before this 2-nvidia-setup I had an ATI AGP card with 2 monitors and the nvidia PCI card. ATI's TwinView equivalent also disguises as xinerama but although I had the nvidia card installed and therefore 2 screens, gnome behaved properly.

I don't know if the setup of xinerama+more-than-one-big-screen complies with the standards. If it doesn't neither ati nor nvidia follow the standard with their implementations but the ATI thing works better.
If it complies with the standards, nvidia doesn't seem to follow it 100%, in which case this would be a bug.

Can anybody with knowledge about xinerama and its implementation comment on this?

Thanks