I’m in the process of figuring out which Ubuntu 9.10 desktop will work with my collection of hardware. That I got all this working successfully with Xubuntu 8.10 is most likely a testament to raw determination rather than good sense, but that’s water over the dam.
The hardware:
- Kensington Expert Mouse trackball (must use left-hand buttons)
- Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman (must use right-hand buttons)
- Wacom Graphire3 6×8 tablet (must swap side buttons)
- Dell 2001FP 1600×1200 landscape display (left side)
- Dell 2005FP 1680×1050 portrait display (right side)
- nVidia GeForce 9400 GT dual-DVI card (using nVidia driver)
- Dell Dimension 9150 deskside PC
- Intel HDA Stac92 on-board sound (system sounds)
- Ensoniq AudioPCI plug-in sound (unused right now)
- Logitech USB audio headset (phone calls)
General requirements:
- Monitors must use separate X sessions, not Xinerama or TwinView
- 2005FP must be rotated 1/4 turn CCW into portrait mode
- *buntu preferred, due to large user base
After some trial installations and moderate fiddling, some of which served as blog fodder:
- Kubuntu doesn’t work, as KDE 4.x can’t handle separate X sessions
- Xubuntu is OK, but tends to not have nearly the support of Ubuntu
- Ubuntu comes heartbreakingly close to working
Problems:
- Rotating that monitor is a real problem
- I don’t need RandR, but static rotation in xorg.conf causes other problems
- The tablet wants to cover both screens, but that’s fixable
- Trackball handedness requires careful FDI tweakage
- Previous xorg.conf setup is not useful in the new world of FDI files
- Most configuration documentation isn’t useful in that new world, either
Installations on other household PCs have gone reasonably well. Installation on my desktop box is in a spare partition, so I can return to What Worked without too much trouble.
With all that in hand, here we go …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
2 responses to “Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 vs Separate X Sessions: Whack-a-mole!”
I haven’t tried doing separate x sessions for separate monitors, but this thread:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/01/28/206240/2-Displays-and-2-Workspaces-With-Linux-and-X
discusses some of the issues in doing this and suggests several possible solutions.
What I want seems to be his “undesired” second option: separate X sessions, one on each monitor, with independent everything and no ability to drag windows back & forth.
Basically, I run most apps in sovereign mode, maximized to full screen, with half a dozen virtual desktops on each monitor. The separate X sessions let me flip from app to app on each desktop, leaving the other as-is.
So, for example, on the left monitor:
On the right monitor:
I can’t get there with Xinerama, as I don’t want a single app “visible on all desktops” on the portrait monitor.
The rotated portrait monitor seems to be the dealbreaker. It used to work (hence all the happy comments about how trivial it is and my previous usage), but no longer does (hence my current frustration).
I’m doing some cautious probing with Xubuntu on Arch Linux to see if a simpler, less heavily customized distro has fewer impediments, but I fear the upstream interfaces (xorg, HAL, etc) have changed for the worse.
If that fails, then I’ll try some of the offbeat DMs until I find something that works. Mostly, I don’t care about fancy desktop stuff, but I don’t want something that’s so weird it’s unsupported by anyone except me.
If I didn’t like that rotated monitor so much, life would be way simpler…
Addendum: GNOME and XFCE do support separate X sessions reasonably well. The real problem is the X system’s interaction with the various & sundry input devices scattered around my desk. More on those later…