Dual-head config broke with update to 1.4.2

[Dave Airlie]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 12:19 PM, Martin Cracauer <cracauer at cons.org> wrote:
> Thanks for all the clarifications, Alex.
>
> I understand the desire to drop the lesser used of two similar
> subsystems, but it does present a real problem for me.
>
> To elaborate a little.
>
> Alex Deucher wrote on Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 06:16:25PM -0500:
>> > That there will be no way to have different virtual desktop switching
>> > on the two screens? Just Microsoft Windows style big span screen
>> > support?
>>
>> It can be done with zephyr or vnc I think.
>
> What I do with dual screens is this:
> - my right screen, the main screen, has virtual desktops, each of them
>  holding one "project", where a project is something like:
>  - bunch'a xterms and emacsens for hacking project 1
>  - a gimp session
>  - bunch'a xterms and emacsens for hacking project 2
>  - bunch'a xterms for debugging a network problem
> - the left screen has one of them things:
>  - a bunch of machine monitoring, IRC client, IM and assorted other
>    status
>  - or else a movie in xine
>  - plus other virtual desktops that might holds things like google earth
>
> So when I work I want to switch the left screen between my projects,
> but the right screen should stay static.

Thats actually a desktop environment/window manager issue, not a
driver issue. I think only one wm can do this so far, enlightenment.

> BTW, I am typing this on the same version X11 server, but with the
> NVidia drivers.  And I haven't seen any breakage yet.

NVIDIA don't really use the X server internals much for this, its pretty
much all in their driver from memory.

Though really the problem is the radeon driver now supports more than
VGA + DVI, and configuring dual-head worked by chance in the past,
adding TV etc broke it, nobody cares enough to add another xorg.conf
option to select which outputs go to which screen.

Basically my theory was if enough people as you claim the majority of
people cared about your use case then one of them would have produced
this patch in the 2 years this has been like this, esp if they are hacker types,
who don't do presentations with Powerpoint and run FreeBSD, but maybe
they just Apples now.

Dave.
(who is responsible for it working at all since randr came in).