Hi everyone,

I'm using (well, tring to..) KDE 4.5 on Fedora 14. When I'm working at home I use to connect my laptop (ATI card with latest Catalyst drivers) to an external display. As far as I understood, the only working configuration currently is extended desktop with Xinerama, which I can confirm.
This morning I booted into KDE after having disconnected the external monitor last night. KDE was obviously confused as it showed the external monitor desktop on my laptop (wallpaper and size). Then I went into the AMD Catalyst Control Center and switched off xinerama manually. When I logged out and logged in the desktop appearance was like it should be.
Then tried to start working, but every application I launched didn't appear. Then I realized KDE was opening the apps windows somewhere else (they are actually launched and appear in the panel manager)!! Maybe is in the "ghost" external desktop??? Now I cannot work with KDE anymore so I switched to Gnome which is working correctly. Do you think there is a way to revert to the original situation without having to wait to go home and connect the external display back?

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance,

w.

Check the output of "xrandr" and see if it shows the secondary display.
Also, try opening the Display & Monitors section of System Settings and verifying your settings there.

warpino wrote:Hi everyone,

I'm using (well, tring to..) KDE 4.5 on Fedora 14. When I'm working at home I use to connect my laptop (ATI card with latest Catalyst drivers) to an external display. As far as I understood, the only working configuration currently is extended desktop with Xinerama, which I can confirm.
This morning I booted into KDE after having disconnected the external monitor last night. KDE was obviously confused as it showed the external monitor desktop on my laptop (wallpaper and size). Then I went into the AMD Catalyst Control Center and switched off xinerama manually. When I logged out and logged in the desktop appearance was like it should be.
Then tried to start working, but every application I launched didn't appear. Then I realized KDE was opening the apps windows somewhere else (they are actually launched and appear in the panel manager)!! Maybe is in the "ghost" external desktop??? Now I cannot work with KDE anymore so I switched to Gnome which is working correctly. Do you think there is a way to revert to the original situation without having to wait to go home and connect the external display back?

I had a similar problem using KDE 4.5.1 on Kubuntu 10.10. I initially let KDE detect my two monitors. Everything worked fine first (i.e. the mouse cursor and apps moving across the two displays with no problem), but the next time I rebooted, KDE somehow thought I had two screens, one cloning the other. Whenever I opened an app, it showed up on both displays.

I went to System Settings --> Monitor & Display and disabled the second monitor. Now, the second monitor was (naturally) blank but like in your situation, my apps opened right there. I had to use Alt + Left Click to drag the apps from that invisible area into the first display.

Long story short, I ended up installing and configuring the nVidia driver using Twinview. That has fixed the problem.

unluckily I have an ATI card. Latest Catalyst drivers are working pretty well but I don't think I have something such as "TwinView".

thanks for your reply,

w.