Hi,

I have a laptop to which I have an external LCD screen connected when I'm docked at office. In KDE4.3.1 I have not found a way to configure my preferred "main screen" where the taskbar etc appears by default.

When I'm using the laptop undocked, ofcourse the taskbar panel appears on my internal LVDS1 screen, but when I'm docked and my 28" external monitor is connected I would very much like to tell KDE to use THAT external screen as the main monitor and thus display the taskbar there.
Is there an undocumented way to tell KDE to do this?

It seems like KDE window manager is choosing main screen alphabetically, because when I connect the external monitor via DisplayPort (DP1) it uses that one as primary. However, DP support in kernel is still buggy for my card, so I use RGB1 instead, and then LVDS1 is given preference...
In addition to be able to set this, I'd also like to find a way where I can configure the length of the panel relative to the right side of the screen instead of number of pixels from the left. The reason is that with my external screen nearly twice the size of my laptop monitor, the panel appears too short on the big one..

Are there any .config-file settings to be able to control this, or should I file a feature enhancement request?

Thanks in advance!

Kephal is responsible in KDE for providing information on the screens. It is probable that it sorts the screens alphabetically. Unfortunately at this time, no graphical utility provided by KDE is capable of managing the "positioning" of the screens.

bcooksley wrote:Kephal is responsible in KDE for providing information on the screens. It is probable that it sorts the screens alphabetically. Unfortunately at this time, no graphical utility provided by KDE is capable of managing the "positioning" of the screens.

OK, there is no graphical utility provided by KDE to manage the positioning of the screens. But this is a different problem that can be solved. I'm using the ATI binary drivers and I just need to write the Position option in xorg.conf. For instance, my laptop resolution is 1366x768, and I have an external one who is 1024x768. I want to put the second monitor on the right so I get a 2390x768 monitor:

Section "Monitor"
...
Option "Position" "1366 0"
EndSection

This is perfect. But the question here is different: is there any way (whether graphical or not) I can choose the default monitor, that is, the monitor on which plasmoids appear by default?

My configuration is perfectly working (even with different resolutions for the two) but I ALWAYS want the "main screen" to be the laptop LCD screen, whether I'm using multiple monitors or not.
When I start dual head in catalyst, instead, the KDE plasmoids instantly move to the other monitor and my entire desktop becomes a mess, because everything get rearranged to fit the resolution of the external monitor which is a lot bigger.

Thanks

As far as I am aware, Plasma simply selects the first display provided by X, which is probably the first display in the xorg.conf file...

Oh, and I forgot about System Settings > Display > Size & Configuration, which provides *some* configuration about monitors... ( note that you need to run KRandRTray on startup for the settings to be applied )

If panels were linked to activities as containments are, this would be trivial to fix.

I'd settle for not being able to choose my main screen if the settings I do use get remembered between sessions... At the moment I have to launch krandr every time I log in and set the right resolutions and layout of my screens. Although that could be a Kubuntu only bug...

This is not a Kubuntu only bug. At this time, krandrtray does not support profiles of any kind. It should however, if run on startup and all hardware being present restore what settings it is configured to ( See System Settings > Display )