WEBlog -- Wouter's Eclectic Blog

Fri, 18 Sep 2009

Dear lazyweb,

Since a day or two, I've got myself a nice new monitor. It's positively huge, which makes it useful even alone.

There is, however, one little problem. When I call xrandr --output LVDS --right-of VGA, my laptop's display is situated at the top right of the monitor. This is not what I'm after; I'd much rather have it at the bottom right of the monitor, since

Hints as to how one should fix this are more than welcome.

Reply...
S:xrandr can position by pixels
A:Josh Triplett
E:
D:2009-09-18 09:07:22.393249
xrandr's simple positioning options (--right-of, --left-of, --above, and --below) always line up the top or left edges of the monitors as appropriate. However, you can tell xrandr exactly what you want: xrandr --output LVDS --pos $((VGA_width))x$((VGA_height - LVDS_height))

You might also try arandr, from the package of the same name; it provides a graphical interface to xrandr which lets you drag monitor images around, and it can generate scripts which recreate a given configuration.
S:Sounds like icewm needs fixing
A:Josh Triplett
E:
D:2009-09-18 09:08:43.894417
If icewm's taskbar extends across monitors, that sounds like a bug; icewm ought to use Xinerama/xrandr to find out the screen configuration and Do The Right Thing.
S:Tried --pos?
A:Evgeni
E:evgeni@debian.org
D:2009-09-18 09:24:54.122651
Hi Wouter,

did you try to use xrandr's --pos switch?
Currently you should see something like this in xrandr output:
LVDS connected 1440x900+1680+0

When calling xrandr, try
xrandr --output LVDS --pos 1680x300
(adjust numbers as needed)

Regards
Evgeni
S:Xrandr options
A:Jonathan Brugge
E:
D:2009-09-18 11:57:50.599499
Does xrandr's option '--pos XxY' (specified per output) help you? I haven't tested it, as my second monitor is set up on top of the primary screen (and the default of aligning it to the left then suits me fine), but it looks like it might help.
S:taskbar
A:cate
E:cate@debian.org
D:2009-09-18 15:26:47.75819
or move the task bar at the top of the screen (and without padding, to allow you to use sometime only one monitor), as I did ;-)
S:GNOME
A:Jason D. Clinton
E:me@jasonclinton.com
D:2009-09-18 17:59:51.569729
GNOME's xrandr applet supports positioning the monitor layout graphically and then restoring this configuration automatically IF the monitor configuration is currently plugged in (it probes). In short: if you want modern desktop niceties, stop using IceWM.
S:Re: GNOME
A:Wouter Verhelst
E:w@uter.be
D:2009-09-18 19:54:14.327406
I absolutely definitely do not want 'modern desktop niceties', thank you very much. One of the main reasons I'm using IceWM today is because GNOME sucks so much and kept getting in my way.
Never the less, thanks for the suggestion :-)