Linux Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Dual Screens, And Me
#1
This weekend I began to once again mess around with Linux, after having not used it for a couple years. I have a variety of things I wanted to mess with on Linux, but I had a couple "must have working or I'm back to Windows" things. My XBMC setup was one of those. We use Ubuntu at my company, and its generally the most popular and thus well supported distribution around. My basis for this is that, when I need to do any random obscure thing, I always find guides for Ubuntu. This was extremely annoying back when I was messing with RedHat. So yeah, Ubuntu it is.

However, the latest & greatest releases of Ubuntu feature the Unity environment, which feels kinda like Gnome with training wheels and guide rails welded on. Being a tinkering guy who likes to customize everything and have lots of options, I pretty much hate Unity. This ultimately led me to jump to KDE. I last used KDE years ago when version 4 was "just out", and so you had KDE 3 which wasn't quite as nice but worked, and KDE 4, which was gorgeous but kinda totally broken. Fortunately, the current build of KDE 4 is incredible, and I'm really happy with it.

On Windows, my setup is / was like most people I suspect: one LCD screen hooked up on an actual desk, and an HDTV hooked up as a secondary screen. I pretty much always ran XBMC in Fullscreen (Windowed) mode on my TV, so I could easily run it while also running a web browser or doing other things. This is what I wanted on Linux. I eventually got there, but WHAT A PITA!

My roommate and I were both messing around with this stuff all weekend, and as far as we can tell this situation applies to both Nvidia and AMD drivers. The very latest Nvidia beta driver (which just came out recently) finally has RANDR support, after saying they'd do that for 3 years. You've basically got three different ways of handling a "two screens, on GPU" situation:
-Two independent X servers
-Xinerama
-Two screens, extended desktop

None of them seem to be quite as nice as the multi-screen handling in Windows / Mac, and its not clear who to blame that on. Running two independent X servers "works" but totally sucks and isn't comparable to my Windows setup. Its basically a "dual seet" setup where the two desktops can't interact with each other, you cannot drag windows from one to the other, and XBMC "locks" the input for the mouse & keyboard to it when running so you can't run a TV show and then go do something else at the same time. From what I have read, Xinerama is the "old" way of doing dual screen, and isn't what should be used, plus I was having issues with that and Compiz. What ultimately worked out was running the "two screens extended desktop" layout, which is the most analgous to Windows in terms of management & use. This works great, except that certain "full screen" applications go crazy and detect my dual 1080P displays as a single 3840x1080 display.
The notable day-to-day apps I use that do this are XBMC and YouTube,

I switched over to KDE because I just didn't like Unity's look & feel, but I found a solution for my dual screen problems there.
KDE allows you to assign specific window behavior and appearance rules to a particular app, or even a window from a particular app.
As a result I was able to just make XBMC always be 1920x1080, positioned @ 1080x0 (which is the top left corner of the TV) and "always on top", so it covers up any panels on the TV. Then within XBMC I have the system display option set to Windowed mode. Voila: "full screen windowed mode" in Linux. I was able to use the same trick to automatically resize YouTube's full screen window fit only one of my monitors, instead of spanning both in a weird unwatchable way.

I figured I'd post about it over here since this is something I couldn't find a lotta useful info on and it's honestly really simple to fix in KDE once you know what you're looking for. I can post screenshots and stuff once I get home (I'm at work).
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#2
Give XFCE4 (Xubuntu) a shot as well. Best traditional *nix desktop.
If I helped out pls give me a +

A bunch of XBMC instances, big-ass screen in the basement + a 20TB FreeBSD, ZFS server.
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#3
I am messing around with compiling a custom kernel at present, so once I have an end-to-end set of instructions on how to get Kubuntu+XBMC up and running on a multi-screen environment, I'll also test out Xbuntu. I'm pretty sure it'll be 90% the same, and I'm getting pretty good with Linux after working on it every day Smile
The only troublesome part is that at the moment my job's actually been pretty busy, so I've been spending my day working on actual work, as opposed to hobby stuff like this. Imagine that!
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