Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
I have 2 monitors with each keyboard/mouse [...] But another use is one user with xinerama. [...] What in the world would I use xinerama for? Not having had it, being small-minded, now I can't think of a use of it.
I use two monitors under Win2K (19in @ 1280x1024x32bpp and 17 in @ 1024x768x32bpp off a GeForce DDR and Matrox G200). I *really* like it. I couldn't imagine working with one monitor. Even upgrading to a larger screen wouldn't cut it. I always flipped between windows a lot and this saves me from doing this. It's great if you're comparing two things, or want to keep an eye something whilst you work on something else, or if you have IM sessions where you're discussing something that's going on in another window, or you want a debugger and the app you're debugging visible at the same time, etc, etc. A large screen and a focus follows mouse policy goes some way to covering this, but it's really inadequate in comparison.
To be honest I haven't had much luck with Xinerama. First of all, X wouldn't run my G200 at the resolution and colour depth I wanted - it complained about the adapter not having enough even though Win2K will drive it to much higher resolutions. And, the window placement policies seem to really suck. Win2K assigns one of the monitors as the primary and this is where apps will appear the first time. Xinerma seems to apply this to the left-most monitor (presumably it's a continuous virtual desktop with 0x0 in the upper left), but that I find really irritating and I didn't want to move the smaller monitor to the other side of my desk. Admittedly I didn't spend more than a few hours (a few hours too many IMHO) trying to fix it as I don't use Linux on the desktop enough to worth worrying about it. I just wish it worked more sensibly or easily out of the box... but that's another story ;)
Malc