Tuesday, October 19th, 2010
The longer I spend with XMonad as a window manager, the more I like it. Now I’m running on multiple screens, the time saved by not manually moving windows around between screens, maximising and un-obscuring them is very noticeable.
I do still rely on the mouse a little too much though, and now I have 4 screens in a square arrangement its easy to lose sight of the pointer — expecially when using XMonad to open/switch/rearrange windows from the keyboard. I asked Ubuntu for a larger more visible pointer which helped, but now I’ve found an XMonad action that drags the mouse in to the focused window …
http://xmonad.org/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-Actions-UpdatePointer.html
xmonad.hs :-
import XMonad.Actions.UpdatePointer
...
logHook = updatePointer (Relative 0.5 0.5)
Sorted. What shall I change next? …
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Monday, October 18th, 2010
After success in getting my 4 screen setup under Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. Quite a mistake — there is a Xinerama bug was an X.org bug that crashes X when running Qt and some other applications.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qt4-x11/+bug/650539
Despite being deprecated in favour of RandR, Ximerama remains the only way to properly multiscreen multiple graphics cards. Sadly it looks like a typo crept in during a recent code clean-up in Xorg. The Arch Linux community found the fault and talked to upstream (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=841628) which resulted in an accepted patch to Xorg (http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2010-October/014150.html)
Now we just have to wait for an update to the Ubuntu packages. Until that lands, I can’t run multiscreen on Ubuntu 10.10, because I need many of the affected apps in my workflow. And now I’ve invested in a multi-arm monitor stand system (see http://integinternational.com/modular-monitor-arms/, a New Zealand manufactured item) I really don’t want to go back to just two screens …
Update
As of 3 December, Ubuntu have released the fix to the xorg-server package in 10.10.
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