Intel graphics, xrandr and GNOME: the case of the moving panel 4


If you're using xrandr on a box with an intel graphics chip in order to setup your dual displays then you might have noticed that gnome moves its main panel to the monitor connected to the external vga port.  This happens because the Intel chip says that the external VGA is the primary port and the laptop LCD is the secondary and GNOME happily accepts this.  With some applications, like mythtv or OpenOffice, you can specify which monitor is the primary and secondary display, but not with GNOME.  You're stuck with the panel moving to the external display.

As far as I know this is something that only the Intel based chips do when working with dual monitors.  GNOME on dual monitors for other graphics systems doesn't appear to behave this way.

This can suck if the external display has a much smaller resolution than the laptop because all your finely tuned launchers, drawers and panel applications will get squeezed together on that external monitor but not put back to their correct positions when you switch back.  This is one reason I switch to a different user when I do my presentations at user group meetings since I can't guarantee what the resolution of the projector will be.

I'm not sure if kde exhibits this problem but I vaguely remember someone saying KDE figures out what's going and and does the right thing (leaves the panels on the laptop LCD).  Since I don't use KDE (and don't feel like logging out and then back into a separate session to test it) I can't tell you what will happen.  Feel free to comment on your experiences here.


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4 thoughts on “Intel graphics, xrandr and GNOME: the case of the moving panel

  • Motin

    I hadn’t been surprised if your post was from Feb 11 2008, but this is one year later and there is no way to tell GNOME which monitor is the primary yet… Back to the dragging panels routine then. If you find anything, post a comment please. Big thanks!

  • mjhammel Post author

    I did a little quick qoogling but didn’t find anything relevant. To my knowledge GNOME still doesn’t provide a way to specify the primary monitor. The other problem, of course, is that the Intel chipset automatically sets the external monitor as the primary monitor. So either the intel driver allows you to change this or GNOME could. But at the moment, at least as far as I know, neither does.