How to make the panel and widgets stay on the laptop screen in dual screen mode.

[pnunn]

Hi Guys,

I'm having a great time with this distro at the moment, but have a few little annoyances I'd like some help on.

When I plug my laptop into its docking station and fire up the second monitor with nvidia-settings, no matter what I select as the master monitor, the panel and widgets end up on the external monitor rather than staying on the laptop one (which I'd prefer).

Any ideas how to control this?

Thanks.

Peter.

[andystmartin]

My solution may not work for you. But, for me it stabilized my laptop/external monitor situation at the expense of losing some fancy 3d-graphics capabilities.

Here goes: dump the proprietary nvidia drivers and use the nouveau drivers and the xrandr utility. The nvidia drivers do not work with xrandr.

I have written a small script that uses xrandr to detect any external monitors connected to my laptop and set the external monitor as the "primary" monitor. When I disconnect the laptop to go to a meeting, I rerun the script to resize my desktop to the size of my display.

The nouveau drivers may not be optimal for "everyone", but neither are the proprietary nvidia drivers. There are always options...