KDE 4 with dual-head

[Chris Snook]

Ian Pilcher wrote:
> Is anyone using KDE 4 with a dual-head setup?  From my brief testing, it
> seems almost unusable.  In particular, the second screen ends up with a
> solid gray background that doesn't even respond to mouse clicks.
> 
> Is this one of the many pieces of basic functionality that has been
> sacrificed for the KDE developers' "grand vision"?

The rpmfusion/livna Nvidia driver has a nasty bug that impacts any app or 
library that tries to load the xrandr extension (which most of the KDE 4 libs 
do) when you're using Xinerama.  I was able to make it mostly behave with the 
following technique:

chkconfig nvidia off
(so your config doesn't get mangled each reboot)

system-config-display --reconfig
(generates fresh xorg.conf, choose nvidia driver and single-head)

nvidia-settings
(set up dual-head, uncheck "merge with existing" when saving xorg.conf)

It'll still cause a segfault if you try to load anything that touches xrandr 
config (like krandr, or the Display control panel), and I get occasional 
weirdness, but it generally works.  I fully intend to complain to the proper 
authorities once I figure out what's going on, but I'm pretty sure that KDE is 
just a victim of Nvidia's xrandr badness.

-- Chris