hey guys, im running on a laptop, but i leave the lid closed, and have a desktop display and keyboard and mouse hooked into it. the display is connected via hdmi, and is 1920x1280, and was configured properly, without any issues after reboots.

i had a kernel crash, which seemed to screw up the session, so i rebooted. and after that, external hdmi resolution settings suddenly do not persist. i set them again, and rebooted again, so as to have a clean bootup, but they still didn't persist - i had to resetup the hdmi to its proper resolution. do you have any ideas what may have been affected that would cause kde/plasma to be unable to persist the hdmi resolution?

here's a screenshot: http://www.mediafire.com/view/8o10kzyi6 ... ings-1.png

after looking at the settings again, i noticed the "primary output" setting near the bottom. i never noticed it before, so i don't know what it was set to before. i set it to "hdmi1", applied the changes, and rebooted. after reboot, the "primary output" it was reset to "none" (but it may have always been set to "none" and just defaulted to the only currently running display, which would be hdmi1 since the laptop lid is closed), and the hdmi1 resolution was reset to the laptop's dimensions.

so, there seems to be an issue with settings being able to persist. this may possibly be due to a problem in detection of the hardware during session startup - but the hardware is available right from the POST screen - so BIOS sees it just fine - so this shouldn't be an issue of "hardware not present during session startup", however, this MAY be an issue of "hardware not detected properly during session startup" - but that is unlikely as well, since it is USING the hardware to display the login screen and the subsequent session. not sure where to look with this one...

thanks!

That looks like krandr - which if I recall correctly always had issues with the persistence of settings. KScreen handles this much better, and is part of Extragear in recent releases.

If you examine the file ~/.kde4/share/config/krandrrc you will probably find a line listing a command beginning with "xrandr".
Running that command (from the xrandr part onwards) should cause your screen settings to be applied.

this is what it contains, which appears to have the correct settings. i'm guessing, by what you were describing, that the version of KDE im using has an older version of the config file?

Code: Select all

[Screen_0]
OutputsUnified=false
UnifiedRect=0,0,0,0
UnifiedRotation=1

[Screen_0_Output_HDMI1]
Active=true
Rect=0,0,1920,1200
RefreshRate=59.9501724243164
Rotation=1

[Screen_0_Output_LVDS1]
Active=true
Rect=0,0,1152,864
RefreshRate=59.9970588684082
Rotation=1


Hm - it should be present there. Do you have "Apply settings on startup" enabled in the "krandrtray" settings?

actually, i don't even know what krandrtray is or where to find it ... (o_O). and i've never seen a "apply settings on startup" option in any of the other KDE settings. but, as i mentioned, this was working just fine until i had that kernel crash, presumably due to maxing out my memory.

it's possible that when i FORCED the computer to restart, it would have screwed up KDE, by not giving it a chance to save the current session settings. but i don't think that could be the cause, because (1) those settings have never changed since i first installed debian (2) i've set the proper settings again and rebooted, a few times.

whatever configuration got broken is not making itself obvious. it doesn't make sense why THAT configuration suddenly doesn't work properly, but all of the other settings are just fine between reboots. i guess i'll wait and see if it fixes itself...

thanks!

Hmm. krandrtray is a application which lets you conveniently control screen resolution settings from a system tray icon in KDE. At times, it has also been involved in applying the previously used settings on login.

i got it figured out.

1: i ran the krandrtray command from the terminal, which launched it's system tray icon, but, it was the same "system-displays" dialog you can access in the main system settings dialog, and it didn't have that option you mentioned.

2: there is an option at the bottom of the system-displays dialog, that says "save as default". i ASSUMED it automatically saved it as default when you closed the dialog, and you only need to use that option if you want to save the current settings as a separate profile name. i told it to save the current settings as default, then restarted, and every thing seems to be just fine now. so, evidently, the problem was the KDE config file DID get broken, and i did not understand that i needed to explicitly save a new default config file.

here's the new config file:

Code: Select all

[Display]
ApplyOnStartup=true
StartupCommands=xrandr --output LVDS1 --pos 0x0 --mode 1152x864 --refresh 59.9971\nxrandr --output HDMI1 --pos 0x0 --mode 1920x1200 --refresh 59.9502\nxrandr --noprimary

[Screen_0]
OutputsUnified=false
UnifiedRect=0,0,0,0
UnifiedRotation=1

[Screen_0_Output_HDMI1]
Active=true
Rect=0,0,1920,1200
RefreshRate=75
Rotation=1

[Screen_0_Output_LVDS1]
Active=true
Rect=0,0,1152,864
RefreshRate=59.9970588684082
Rotation=1


thanks!

Ah - the save as default appears to be a new replacement to the old "Apply settings on startup" checkbox I was referring to.
Good to see it is now working.