Whither Size & Orientation in Display and Montior in system settings

[ronw]

I noticed tonight that Display and Monitor in System Settings no longer has the Size & Orientation section/panel/category. Just the screen locker stuff.

Not really a problem on that VM, but curious.

[SteveRiley]

What happens if you run the following at a command prompt:

kcmshell4 randr

[ronw]

ronw@raring:~$ kcmshell4 randr
Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf", line 9: reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated.
kcmshell(3506)/kdecore (services) KServiceFactory::findServiceByDesktopPath: "randr.desktop" not found
kcmshell(3506)/kdecore (services) KServiceFactory::findServiceByDesktopPath: "kcm_randr.desktop" not found
kcmshell(3506)/kdecore (services) KServiceFactory::findServiceByDesktopPath: "kcmrandr.desktop" not found
Could not find module 'randr'. See kcmshell4 --list for the full list of modules.
ronw@raring:~$ kcmshell4 --list

kcmshell4 --list | grep randr returned nothing.

Your question prompted me to search for 'randr', instead of 'xrandr' that I searched for last night. That showed kde-workspace-randr was not installed. I installed that and the Size and Orientation options/panel/category is there again.

Thanks for the pointer.

I guess I might have missed this being autoremoved.

[kubicle]

IIRC, 'kscreen' is used in raring by default (replacing the randr module)

[SteveRiley]

Ah, I missed that this was in the Raring board.

In my Raring VM, I see both "Display Configuration" and "Size and Orientation" in System Settings -> Display and Monitor. The former is started by kcmshell4 kcm_kscreen; the latter is started by either kcmshell4 display or kcmshell4 randr. I haven't updated this VM in about a month, though.

[ronw]

IIRC, 'kscreen' is used in raring by default (replacing the randr module)

Seems like a regression. I was left with no way to adjust screen size; or at least no way that was obvious to me.

Size & Orientation was there before. Or I'm losing my mind. But defintely one of the two.

[kubicle]

Seems like a regression. I was left with no way to adjust screen size; or at least no way that was obvious to me.
Size & Orientation was there before. Or I'm losing my mind. But defintely one of the two.

'kubuntu-desktop' recommends 'kscreen' package, so it should be installed by default on new installations or upgrades. If a box doesn't have kubuntu-desktop package installed or is configured not to treat recommends as depends, kscreen probably won't be installed automatically on upgrades (and needs to be installed manually). Kscreen is the package that provides the "new" kscreen display config module for system settings.

It's also possible that the randr module gets marked autoremovable since nothing depends on it anymore on raring, so you can end up with no display config modules if you autoremove packages.

[ronw]

My Raring VM does not have kubuntu-desktop installed, so what you said makes sense kubicle.

[kubicle]

My Raring VM does not have kubuntu-desktop installed, so what you said makes sense kubicle.

That would explain the first part of the puzzle.

I digged a bit deeper, and it seems the "old" randr module was broken into it's own package in raring, the module was previously in 'kde-workspace-bin', so that would likely explain why you didn't have the module installed anymore (so you didn't necessarily remove anything, the module was dropped from kde-workspace-bin in an upgrade at some point)

if you don't have kubuntu-desktop installed, it's a good policy to check it's depends/recommends from time to time to see if the devs have added new packages that you might be missing out on (the best solution would be keeping it installed, especially during release upgrades...but I don't have it installed either, so I'm not going to take a holier-than-thou attitude on that one).

[mruffalo]

Thank you for this; I was about to post a thread. I posted one on the KDE forums and was told that this is Kubuntu-specific -- my question on the KDE forums was how to clone a display on two monitors with exactly the same orientation. The new "Display Configuration" dialog does not have the required functionality.

Manually installing the "kde-workspace-randr" package restored the old "Size & Orientation" pane in Display Configuration, so now I can actually use my laptop for presentations again.

quasi-EDIT: Looks like I can't post a link to my thread on the KDE forums because I've only posted twice here. It's in KDE Software -> Workspace -> Appearance & System Customization -> Display Configuration: how to clone monitors?