Hi,

I am running a special setup of linux computers which have two monitors connected. The second display is :0.1 and should run KDE and the first display :0.1 should run Motif window manager (mwm). On CentOS 5 with KDE 3 this is not a problem. After XWindows are started there is a script that starts the appropriate clients including window managers something like this:

DISPLAY=:0.1 kwin &
DISPLAY=:0.1 kicker &
DISPLAY=:0.1 kdesktop &
exec mwm

Since CentOS 5 is getting old and I cannot get drivers for newer computers for CentOS 5 I need to think about upgrade to CentOS 7. I have resolved all the issues regarding runlevels, xorg.conf, and other stuff that has changed.

The problem I have now is how to make KDE run on screen :0.0 and messing with screen :0.1 where mwm should run. KDE starts so many interconnected binaries that it becomes an unmanagable mess for me.

Is there a way to start KDE on one screen and not messing with another one?

Just some guesses, you could try to set

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[X11]
disableMultihead=true


in ~/.kde4/share/config/kcmdisplayrc (or ~/.kde/share/...), or set the environment variable KDE_MULTIHEAD to false before you start KWin.

This bug report may be relevant: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=256242

Thanks Hans. With the multihead settings now kde only starts on one screen. However kwin still starts on another screen too. I killed it manually and started mwm there and it worked. Now I need to figure out how to do that automatically in a script to get into this state after reboot.

I also did not write the question well. I also wanted to figure our which programs do I need to run in KDE 4. In KDE 3 kwin, kicker and kdesktop were enough to get the functionalities we needed. The users have very limited functionalities and should not change any settings. In KDE 4 I didn't find kicker and kdesktop any more and I didn't know which programs to run besides kwin. Well I figured out that all the binaries are interconnected and dependent on each other. So the best option is to start KDE with startkde and try to setup the environment in that way that users will have limited functionalities with Kiosk setup. However I get a feeling that Kiosk is another thing forgotten in KDE4, but this is not a topic of this thread.

KWin multihead handling was broken during some KDE 4 versions, however you should try to

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export KDE_MULTIHEAD=false


in a scriptlet eg. ~/.kde/env/disable_multihead.sh (needs to be executable, ie. chmod 744)

To answer your other question, desktop and panel are one process "plasma-desktop" ("plasmashell" in KDE5
You may also want to run "krunner" (Alt+F2 runner)

The rest (notably kded, kglobalaccel) should be started automagically.

I have managed to write a script which kill undesired kwin and starts mwm there. I have started KDE with startkde and I will try also (kwin, plasma-desktop, krunnner).