I'm running XP pro with dual monitors. LEft monitor is my prime...Any good themes for dual monitor?
i'd suggest making your own, that's your best bet for getting a theme to work 100% on duals.
Well piffle! I can just tell that the next year of my life is going to be litestep bound....I'm fairly new, and thought I would find a theme that was halfway there, and mess with it a little...wasn't ready to build a total theme yet... :-)
best way to do it is looking into older themes. some of the older themes were not designed for dual-monitor setups but they allowed for them. Themes like 18 and 21 by darkfyre or BrushedNeXT by dreamer allowed for them nicely. Good luck.
I only have one monitor, but I ever wanted my themes to be multi-monitors compliant.
Just tell me what's the trouble with "standard" themes...
Themes that use resolution independent configurations are not multimonitor capable. When you use some settings from the left and others from the right the theme gets all skrewed up when the resolution doubles in width. The themes I have listed are not bar themes and so they work well on 3200 width monitors.
If I have some stuff on the right (with negative cords), some stuff on the left, and nothing centered or $ResolutionX$ stretched, will it works ?
nope...basically what happens with a dualhead display is this. If you have 2 1600x1200 desktops you end up with one 3200x1200 desktop. If you start from both ends you get nothing appearing right because your math gets all wrong. When things really start getting skrewed up is when you have people like me running 1600x1200 on a primary display and 300x200 on a secondary. :) so in short...easiest way to do dual-head themes is to pick a start point and stick with it, whether it be pos. or neg.
Of course...
I worked all night (it's 8 am, here) and I'm a little tired...
So, just few questions (before coming back with great ideas):
- Is the primary display always on the right, or always on the left, or user defined ?
- What is exactly the difference between primary and secondary display (except the resolution) ?
- Humm, what about an eventually third monitor ?
The Primary Display can be physically wherever I want it; however, I believe windows always believes that it is all the way to the left.
On my video card I have two outputs. One I run to my 17" Dell Trinitron and the other outputs to my 27" TV. However, many users get dualhead setups by putting in more than one video card. At my old job we had an NT machine with 3 monitors on it. A 4th video card could have been added but after that you start having IRQ and IO Problems.
Humm, I think I will stay on a "simple" two monitors compliance...
In fact, I will sleep for a while and come back tomorrow to open a new thread. I'll call it "What about X-OTS" and it will not only talk about multi-monitors themes compliance...
cya
The primary display is always at 0,0. Others can be *anywhere* as long as one pixel is next to one pixel of an existing monitor.
Most people put their second monitor on the right tho, and often at the same resolution as the primary, which greatly simplifies things.
If any display is above or to the left of the primary display (ie, in negative space), coordinates for on top and on bottom modules will not be the same: on bottom coordinates start at 0,0 as the most left/top position, while on top starts 0,0 on the primary monitor. Some modules adjust for this correctly, some adjust for it incorrectly, and some don't adjust for it at all.
Also, it's entirely possible for there to be dead space between the top/leftmost corner and the bottom/rightmost corner of the desktop. If you align everything to the bottom right and someone has their second monitor on the right at a lower res, your stuff will probably be invisible. (some modules also try to adjust for this, but not necessarily how you want them to)
Humm, what about having all Litestep stuff only on the primary monitor ?
This is what freaks me out - because none of the themes I've downloaded work correctly - top bar, or not - except simplicity? Simplicity seems to work fine with my dual monitors - left being my primary, and both resolutions the same. How is this even possible - I don't see anything in the step about dual monitor support...a good coder should be able to make a them no problem that supports dual monitor. When I run windows shell dual monitor works super well? This seems to be a big litestep draw back, because once you go dual monitor - It would be hard to go back???
Humm, and what about having all the Litestep stuff only on the primary monitor ?
To put all LiteStep stuff on a Primary monitor use all Positve settings less than the resolution of that Primary Monitor. If you want a 100 pixel width system tray on the left hand side of the screen and the resolution on the Primary Display is 800 you need to put it at 700 and not -100.
Er... To put everything on the primary monitor: make everything on top or floating and do as devilboi says. If you have stuff on bottom then this only works when no monitors are in negative space. (unless you use an old desktop module)
Actually, at least in recent builds, $resolutionx$ and $resolutiony$ are the size of the primary monitor, so you can use $resolutionx-100$ instead of -100. (with my mm build, $allresolutionx$ = 1824, but $resolutionx$ = 1024 and I don't mess with that...)
Also, lsbox doesn't support multimonitor at all (afaik), so if you load everything into lsboxes, it will only and always show up on the primary monitor. (hm, maybe not if you put them on bottom, can you do that?) I think this would be the easiest way to have everything stay on the primary monitor, but it's a little restrictive.
Brickle: most modules need to be slightly modified to work properly with multimonitor systems. The current mishmash of some modules compensating properly or improperly for different parts of the whole thing makes it really complicated. I have a build of indiestep that adds per-monitor variables which makes it mostly possible with unmodified modules, but far from easy.
Come to think of it, $resolutionx$ might be different for dual-head cards and dual cards, since I believe Windows 2000 handles the two cases differently. (dual-head cards look like one monitor, dual cards look like two?) I'm not sure on this 'cuz I don't have a dual-head card...
my dual-head card appears as two different monitors...only real difference is I don't have all the hardware headaches that come with two cards doing the same job.
When I said "What about putting all stuff on the primary monitor", I meant, in fact, "Is this a problem ?" or "Could this be the way ?"
You want to put everything by default on your Primary monitor because that is where Windows likes to open new windows too. Even explorer doesn't put the explorer bar on the spare screens.
I don't want to put anything anywhere... I only have one monitor...
But I want to understand how to make a multi-monitor compliant theme...
Just for the fun... In fact, I've already reach all the goals I've determined for myself. Then...
The trouble is, how do you tell it that it should be on the primary monitor?
See, now thinking about it, I have a feeling some modules try to fix negative space monitors by moving 0,0... I haven't messed with this in a while... No more advice from me until I'm sure I know what I'm talking about :) Let's just say it tends to be a real disaster when the primary isn't the furthest up/left.
I have to video cards -XPpro - absolutley no hardware problems or issues - took about 5 minutes to set it up. My machine rocks though :-)
It looks like we have stumbled upon a serious concern for the dual monitor crowd! I will continue to run the default theme (simplicity) because it works just fine for my dual monitor machine - why? I have no idea...maybe omar is the man. Themers really need to start addressing this situation for 2 monitors, because otherwise it kind of renders litestep dead for people like me (Believe me - I'm working on it also - even though I have no idea, what I am doing) This is troublesome... I know a lot of people who run dual monitors- for graphic design etc.... you can't beat it.
There is code to fix this with no effort from the themers, it's just that it'd require all the modules be updated...
I have used LS for years and have no problems. I just know I have to edit the step before I do anything. :)
I have the nVidia Geforce 4 card which is capable of using two monitors and I recently bought an extra monitor, but it doesn't handle 1024x768. Is it possible to set the resolution for monitor1 to 1024x768 and monitor2 to 800x600?
on my Matrox G450 Dual-Head...yes
Even in shared mode like [1][2] and not only in cloned mode like [1][1]?
never use clone mode. just zoom...player...and natural
Zoom, player and natural? What do you mean?
I'm sorry, but I've never used a two monitor video card before.
Zoom = Ability to specify an area to zoom in on on my Primary Display and display that area full screen on my Secondary Display
Player = Ability for any movie played on the Primary Display, no matter of size, display full screen on Secondary Display
Natural = Use Secondary Display as a normal desktop
Does nVidia nView enable me to use different resolutions for each of the two monitors en Natural mode?