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I've got a dual monitor problem that I don't have the skill to solve...

My Lady's daughter used to have her dinosuar of a PC in our livingroom so that it could be connected to my broadband internet. It mostly ran XP untill {thankfully} it reciently died. But by that time my Lady had become used to using it to access her bank account. And/or browse a few shopping sites. So when her daughter {who also bought herself a new Windows8 laptop} had an opertunity to cheaply aquire a win7 HP pavilion with 6core amd 64bit processor, and both dvi and hdmi outputs, she grabbed it for the house.

It didn't come with a monitor, and our modestly sized flatscreen TV would only be available when nobody wanted to watch TV. But I had an old 19 vga monitor available. So with the help of an dvi-to-vga adaptor I manages to get winows7 configured to put it's desktop display on both the monitor and one of the TV's secondary hdmi inputs, with the same view of the same desktop on both. Obviously the resolution of these outputs must be different in order that the desktop fills both displays in the same way. In both cases there is a black {letterbox like} stripe above and below the portion of the screen being used. But it's not severe enough for my Lady to complain.

Then I finaly got permission to add Linux. I went with my current favorite of Mageia3, which I configured to boot to console via a symlinking default.target to runlevel3.target. And would use startx when I want the gui. The console output was nearly perfect on both screens. But Eventually I wanted to set up the gui video output. I had installed E17. And now it was time to configure it...

E17 has a screen setting utility that requires greater mouse dexterity than I have. And even if {after spending hours at it) I eventualy manage to get it to select the screen resolution I need, the setting is never retained on next reboot... For a long time now I've depended on xrandr to address that problem. I've usually been able to put something like

Code: Select all

 xrandr -s 1024x768

in my ~/.xinitrc to deal with it...

But the results of that on this duel monitor set-up was to wind up with no output to the hdmi tv... Though before I put the call to xrandr in my .xinitrc, E17 openend with only a small portion of the desktop area displayed on the vga monitor, and my attempts to adjust it with xrandr all resulted in the vga monitor turning itself off...

So I tried fighting with E17 point'Nclick display setting utility, with which I was able to set only the vga monitor, And after an hour of wrestling with it I was finally able (once) to get it to stop on the 1024x768 setting. But when I applied the change the vga monitor's scope was limited to an even smaller portion of the desktop...

I know what I want can be done on this hardware from Linux because when I plugin my Puppy Linux Flash drive, it starts up with a nearly perfect match on both display outputs.
{Of course it's using the somewhat simplistic JWM Window Manager...}

As I tried to find a combination that would work for me in E17 under Mageia3, I started redirecting some xrandr output to text files...

Under Mageia, the xrandr version is:

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xrandr program version       1.4.0
Server reports RandR version 1.4


Whereas Under Puppy (Slacko 5.6) it's:

Code: Select all

xrandr program version       1.3.5
Server reports RandR version 1.3


These output texts can be found at:

I started here:
http://pastebin.com/mvmK1Wpv
The verbose form"
http://pastebin.com/JTQ59GTz

On the one occasion when I got E17's Display utillity to adjust it:
http://pastebin.com/cjQMmAGg
The verbose form"
http://pastebin.com/CjzNTjZ7

When I put "xrandr -s 1024x768" in my .initrc:
http://pastebin.com/1h4kfrzi
Seams I forgot to do a verbose output..."

And finaly. what it looks like from Puppy Linux {Where it works!}:
http://pastebin.com/u2g43ngM
The verbose form"
http://pastebin.com/ekRYZd89

Can anybody tell me how to set the duel monitor output of E17 in Mageia3 up to do what Puppy Linux {Slacko 5.6} does out of the box?

That is to have the entire desktop area displayed using the entire screen in both the dvi-to-vga and hdmi outputs. Preferably using xrandr...

Thanks!

xrandr is only one side, what settings are there in xorg.conf on both Mageia and Puppy? Not the whole file, only monitor, display and screen definitions ...

Well I've got a partial fix...

I'm not sure if "CRT1" & "DFP1" are the "XID"s of my outputs, or the names. But since

man xrandr

says one or the other is needed to use the --output option...

Anyway a sequence of 3 commands gets me almost where I need to go. I set a keybinding to run a script which contains:

Code: Select all

xrandr -s 1024x768
sleep 2s
xrandr --output DFP1 --mode 1024x768
sleep 1s
xrandr --output CRT1 --mode 1024x768


And I wind up with this xrandr output:

http://pastebin.com/gijTRfyn

BUT:

Some how it nworks properly for any application window that was initialized in my .initrc but any new application windows started from within E17 render font sizes differently. In the case of konsole, the different resolution is inherited by it's settings pop-ups...

In example:



Anybody know how to make newly initialized application windows follow the normal resolution for screen and output size???

doktor5000 wrote:xrandr is only one side, what settings are there in xorg.conf on both Mageia and Puppy? Not the whole file, only monitor, display and screen definitions ...

Mageia xorg.conf: http://pastebin.com/pbbFDg16


*Puppy xorg.conf: http://pastebin.com/rFi455ye

"Note: part of the Puppy xorg.conf is automatically generated {I think upon boot}
At any rate. have to be running puppy to see file...
Also when I installed Puppy to the Flash drive I was using a PC with only one Monitor {a sony HD flatscreen} And I used Puppy's "QuickSetup first-run settings" wizard to set up the video using something called modesetting then selected 1024x768 from a list.

jtwdyp wrote:Well I've got a partial fix...

The Update:

I'm a lot closer to having this resolved... I did some more empirical testing of xrandr command strings, hoping that I'd guess correctly what the techno jargon in the man document meant, as it described the various options...

Thankfully, unlike most man docs, the one for xrandr currently has a few actual examples. From which I was able to extract how to combine the three xrandr commands I listed in my previous post into a single command.

This command issued by a keybinding right after E17 starts seems to solve all the "video" resolution problems I was having:

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xrandr --fb 1024x768 --output CRT1 --primary --mode 1024x768 --output DFP1 --mode 1024x768


But when I tested using this configuration to display a movie from Hulu on the TV via the HDMI connection I discovered that sound wasn't getting to the TV. Both Win7 And Puppy Linux include sound on the same HDMI connection. But with Mageia, there is no sound. Unless you count when I plug in a set of external PC speakers to the headphone jack. The sound is being output there. {From which I gather that the sound chip is being detected and used...} Just not on the HDMI sound channel(s)...

Any suggestions on how to get Mageia to include the sound output in the HDMI output?

What default output device is displayed in the mixer e17 uses, or in pavucontrol?

doktor5000 wrote:What default output device is displayed in the mixer e17 uses, or in pavucontrol?

According to E17's mixer module
HDA ATI SB

but Alsamixer opens with pulseaudio as default though It's easy to select the more robust: Card: HDA ATI SB Chip: Realtek ALC888-VD

And according to pavucontrol:

Alsamixer is of no interest and shouldn't be used. What you can do is toggle the green check mark on the two devices, IIRC those are a bit tricky, as they don't work like you think they should work.

Dou you have no sound at all via HDMI?

doktor5000 wrote:Alsamixer is of no interest and shouldn't be used. What you can do is toggle the green check mark on the two devices, IIRC those are a bit tricky, as they don't work like you think they should work.

Yeah, you mean the check marks in pavucontrol right? Yeah they are a bit tricky Both devices have one. But only one looks pushed in. Clicking on the one that isn't pushed in, both pushes it in and pushes the other one out. But is doesn't seem to matter as there is no perceivable difference.

Dou you have no sound at all via HDMI?

That's right, While I'm running Mageia, the HDMI connection to the TV is silent. "No sound at all" No matter which checkmark I selected above The HDMI stays silent Whether I muted it or not. And the wimpy sounding speakers plugged into the headphone jack get sound regardless of the check mark position, though that output does respond to the mute toggle associated with the device pavucontrol calls the "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo"... I should note that E17's mixer doesn't list any device labelled with "Caicos" and/or "HDMI" and/or "Radeon" in it's list of "Cards"...
Perhaps that's why sound isn't getting to that channel.

The first thing I always do when I install Mageia is to install Nano. The second thing I do, which is relevant for you, is that I install Kscreen.

I always had HDMI issues before I changed to Kscreen, which is the new standard in KDE and included in Mageia repositories. Now HDMI works perfect.

zeebra wrote:The first thing I always do when I install Mageia is to install Nano. The second thing I do, which is relevant for you, is that I install Kscreen.

I always had HDMI issues before I changed to Kscreen, which is the new standard in KDE and included in Mageia repositories. Now HDMI works perfect.

Thanks for the info. It's possible that Kscreen might have done the trick. But while I'm still addicted to konsole & yakuake, I mostly ran away from kde when I found out that it was going to be difficult to keep the kde3 user interface. I mostly use enlightenment now. I've found that some kde4 apps don't work well without I should install the whole kitten kaboodle. So since I've just solved this issue another way... {see below}

doktor5000 wrote:Dou you have no sound at all via HDMI?

I suddenly figured out what was causing my sound problem. Though given that the fix for it worked, I don't have a clue how the headphone jack was working before I remembered that booting to console and using startx is no longer the standard way to initialize X anymore. And so it misses some of the magic the devs build into the display manager stuff. In particular a startx user sometimes still needs to be a member of certain "groups"... I did a bit of thinking, and used usermod to accomplish this extraction from /etc/group:

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 wheel:x:10:jtwdyp
games:x:20:jtwdyp
cdrom:x:22:jtwdyp
cdwriter:x:80:jtwdyp
audio:x:81:jtwdyp
video:x:82:jtwdyp
dialout:x:83:jtwdyp
users:x:100:jtwdyp


Then I rebooted logged in as jtwdyp, ran startx pressed the keybinding with the xrandr command on it. And now when I playback a Hulu or YouTube video, the HDMI sound channel is working...

Problem solved. Thanks!