xrandr and session

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Sun, 15 Jun 2008 10:37:48 +0200 Jasper Huijsmans wrote:

> 2008/6/13 Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu>:
> > Jean-Christophe wrote:
> >> Hello to all.
> >> Here is my problem:
> >> I've got a laptop, and when I plug a screen on it, I use xrandr to
> >> switch my resolutions. This works fine.
> >> But xfce doesn't reconize it, and I have then my 800x480 desktop
> >> (eeepc...) shown on my 17" configured on 1600x1200 and all the
> >> other parts are blank. I can move my cursor on it but xfce refuses
> >> to display anything there.
> >> One solution I found is to do: 'killall xfwm4 & xfwm4'. Then xfce
> >> reconizes my desktops but xfwm isn't launched with my user's
> >> preferences and can't be configured.
> >> How can I make xfce reconize my xrandr changes?
> >
> > You can't -- Xfce doesn't support the new 1.2 version of xrandr.
> > There's support in xfdesktop in SVN trunk, but it requires gtk 2.13
> > (which I wouldn't recommend installing); not sure what plans the
> > other devs have for their modules (xfwm4, xfce4-panel, mainly).
> >
> 
> Well, I'm not doing anything Xfce-reated at the moment, but I always
> expected Gtk to support this for us.  From your answer I take it that
> we would need Gtk 2.13?

Yep, xrandr 1.2 support just got added to gtk somewhat recently.  It
required a new GdkScreen::monitors-changed signal.

> That's very unfortunate, because apparently
> all/most major linux distros are including Xrandr 1.2 now :(

Well, IIRC, Xfce 4.0 had custom xinerama support because only gtk 2.2
had xinerama support built-in, so I suppose it would be possible to do
something similar for xrandr 1.2.  It's a bit more complicated than
xinerama was, though, so it would be a bit of a pain.  Given all our
limited time, I'd recommend the panel and xfwm just do what I've done:
add support for monitors-changed, and #ifdef it for gtk 2.13.

At any rate, I'm sure most distros that are starting to enable xrandr
1.2 will also include gtk 2.14 when it's released.  I'm not sure xrandr
1.2 driver support is as prolific as you think, though...

	-brian