Autopragmatic

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon with the built-in Nvidia drivers and discovered that my dual monitor desktop reverted to the annoying behavior of placing windows and dialogs dead center in the expanded desktop, right at the split between the two monitors. It would also maximize windows across both monitors rather than just one.

After trying various configuration options in xorg.conf, I found that a simple change to the Compiz Advanced Desktop Effects Settings fixed this problem, at least for most windows. (Some dialogs still split the screens.)

First, install the compizconfig-settings-manager package, which adds the Advanced Desktop Effects Settings application to the System->Preferences menu.

Next, launch that preference app and select the “Display Settings” tab. Manually set the display output configuration in the “Outputs” section, then uncheck “Detect Outputs”. For example, for my side-by-side 1280×1024 screens:

Logout and restart X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace). That should fix the problem.

Some of the Compiz effects may wind up restricted to a single monitor. To fix this, many of them have options to span the effect across all monitors. For example, the “Scale” effect has the following option:

Tags: nvidia, ubuntu

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 11th, 2007 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Howto. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.