Novice trying to understand Xrandr and multi monitor setup

[Ilya Anfimov]

On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 08:38:53PM -0700, TJ Olaes wrote:
>    Good evening.
>    I have a dual monitor setup and am trying to figure out why ScreenCount
>    returns 1.  My code is as follows:

 Good day.

 The ScreenCount is not a RANDR call.
 This  is  from CORE multihead support attempt. That model have a
large pile of drawbacks now: it is very hard to move window  from
one  monitor  to another, or to dynamically make second monitor a
copy of first one, or join monitors in other sensible  configura-
tion.  In  fact,  distinct  screens was almost isolated from each
other.
 Therefore, in attempt to have a good support of  multihead,  new
extensions  introduced,  that  lists all monitors in one CORE X11
screen, and manipulates them by itsel: first was  Xinerama,  than
(and now) RANDR.
 The CORE multiple screens is almost unsed now (well, AFAIK
fglrx creates two screens on dual-GPU notebooks: one with slow
in-CPU accelerator, and one with discrete GPU).

 So  you  should  read  RANDR spec to get information about yoour
monitors.

[skipped]

>    FWIW I'm using Xrandr, and I've tried doing "xrandr --auto" just to see
>    what it detects and I still get the same result.  I'm completely lost

 It is very strange that you see some result of xrandr --auto.
 Usually,  it is completely silent. xrandr -q  is for getting in-
formation.