Bug 9003

Summary:	gnome doesn't do anything with a second screen
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Hans de Goede <hdegoede>
Component:	gdm	Assignee:	Havoc Pennington <hp>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.2
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-08-19 19:10:30 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Hans de Goede 2000-01-30 22:54:10 UTC

gdm, only display a login screen on the first screen. (I have a dual
monitor setup)

gnome-session when started only uses the first screen, the second one stays
empty.

fvwm for example starts itself on all screens a server has.

Talking about having 2 monitors, in order to get them both to work a
commandline option has to be passed to X.

For startx this is doen through xserverrc, it would be nice if gdm would
honor this too.

Comment 1 Havoc Pennington 2000-01-31 19:32:59 UTC

This is a deeply-rooted architectural problem, namely that the GTK toolkit used
to write all the GNOME stuff does not support multiple screens. It's extremely
time-consuming to fix, and since very few people have multiple monitors, the
GNOME project hasn't made it a high priority. The bug is unlikely to be fixed in
the near future unless someone donates programming time or money for hiring
programming time. :-( Still it is a valid bug. Newer versions of GNOME should
at least work a lot better with multiple displays, though we still won't be
able to support multiple screens on the same display.

Comment 2 Hans de Goede 2000-01-31 20:18:59 UTC

I just tested this, but when I use AnotherLevel as desktop I can start gtk apps
(I tried it with gtop) on both screens. I can believe that gtk doesn't now
anything about multiple screens. But it does use the screen set in the DISPLAY
var, not just screen 0. so it does work. So having a wrapper around gnome
session / gdm starting it on both:
:0.0
:0.1

Should work, this seems to be what fvwm does too, I just get 2 fvwm's, but
figures it out itself and forks. Doing it in gdm has the advantage you can be 2
different users on each screen dunno if this is a bug or a feature though.

What I suggest is:
-change gdm and / or gnome-session to:
 -don't init gtk immediatly
 -determine wether or not there are multiple screens. using Xlib
 -fork once for each additional screen
 -setenv DISPLAY to match the screen
 -init gtk
 -continue as usual

Reopen ?!

Comment 3 Havoc Pennington 2000-01-31 21:24:59 UTC

I'll reopen the bug and send your suggestion upstream to the gdm
maintainer. Sounds pretty scary though. :-)

Comment 4 Dale Lovelace 2000-08-19 19:10:28 UTC

Moving bug to gdm.

Comment 5 Havoc Pennington 2001-07-06 23:06:42 UTC

Since we aren't going to fix this on the Red Hat level but leave it to upstream,
closing it in our bugtracker.