:: On Mon, 15 Jul 2002, Dean S. Messing wrote:
 :: 
 :: > 
 :: > Hello Mark, all.
 :: > 
 :: > Last week I posted a bunch of questions asking why KDE was not acting
 :: > in a "xinerama-aware" way.  After lots of hours scouring the net and
 :: > asking a million questions via various lists, one kind soul from
 :: > Mandrake-experts sent me the C code below and said that if my
 :: > Twinview installation was really advertising its xinerama capability
 :: > the code would tell me so.  So I compiled the code as per his
 :: > instructions and ran it.  It returned:
 :: > 
 :: > Xinerama is disabled
 :: > 
 :: > Below, I have included 
 :: > 
 :: > 1. his code
 :: > 
 :: > 2. the XFree86.0.log for the current invocation of X
 :: > 
 :: > 3. my current /etc/X11/XF86Config
 :: > 
 :: > I am, as y'all have gathered by now, utterly ignorant of the innards
 :: > of X so there is very possibly a gross error in my config.
 :: > 
 :: > The only thing I've done (I believe) that is different from
 :: > the nvidia Twinview instructions is to explicitly put
 :: >     Option "Xinerama" "on"
 :: > in Section "ServerFlags".  
 :: 
 ::    That's a problem.  If you load the real Xinerama extension,
 :: we can't load ours.  Remove that line and our driver will install
 :: our version.
 :: 
 :: 
 ::                         Mark.

No, Mark.  "That" wasn't _a_ problem.  It was _the_ problem.
Thanks.

The order in which I tried things was my un-doing.  I first began to
suspect KDE, itself, was the culprit, but didn't at the time know
about the need to "enable" xinerama in the Control Center.  Then I
began to suspect TwinView and so decided to try the "pure xinerama"
route---which among other things, required the explicit xinerama
option in XF86Config.  When I couldn't even get Xinerama to work you
informed me that the binary driver does not support "pure xinerama" on
a single card but assured me that TwinView did the proper advertising
of the necessary parameters.

So back to KDE, and suspicion of it's compilation flags.  By this time
I had put XF86Config back to "twinview" but saw no harm in leaving in
the explicit Xinerama option. (Ha!)  More e-mails to various lists,
more scouring the web, more hours of wasted time.  Finally the "little
C program that could" thanks to Balaji Ramani from the
Mandrake-experts list.

Now KDE is xinerama-aware.  The grayed-out options are black and the
C program says xinerama is enabled.  I'm a "happy camper"---at least for
today.

I must say that there is precious little good documentation on
this.  The xinerama-HOWTO is needs to be updated to mention
that KDE-2.2.2 is definitely (at least somewhat) Xinerama-aware,
but needs to be compiled appropriately and the option needs to be
enabled.  Actually the better place is the KDE docs.  They are, 
unfortunately, silent or mis-leading on these issues.

I suggest that an explicit warning be put into the Nvidia TwinView
ReadMe saying that specifying "xinerama on" (I suppose `startx --
+xinerama', or some-such, would also break things) in XF86Config will
keep the nvidia xinerama extensions from loading, and hence will prevent
window-managers from being xinerama-aware when a single two-port nvidia
graphics card is involved.

>From my reading on the internet, there is great confusion about
xinerama, xinerama-awareness, &c., and such a statement in your ReadMe
can only help disentangle it.

Thanks for you help.

Dean
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