openSuse 12.3/Gnome 3.6 tribulations

Finally got around to upgrading the workstation from OpenSUSE 11.4 to 12.3 (with Nvidia video card). Issues

  • Nvidia, Gnome 3.6, and triple monitors still don’t like to play. I have a Quadro NVS 450, which turns out to be TWO GPUs on a single card. So Linux still sees two separate cards, and Xorg still can’t do accelerated stuff, since it has to rely on Xinerama to tie things together. Long story short: Xinerama works, but Gnome 3.6 still seems to fall to “fallback” mode, and how you set it up matters a LOT.
  • Drag-and-drop on desktop was funny. Turns out, Xorg still cares about how monitors are numbered (not just labelled). My original (nvidia-configurator-created) xorg.conf looked like the code on the right, the corrected code (notice the left-to-right order of the Screen numbers!) on the left:
Section "ServerLayout"                                          Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"                                        Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0                              |     Screen      0  "Screen0" 1280 0
    Screen      1  "Screen1" 1280 0                           |     Screen      1  "Screen1" 0 0
    Screen      2  "Screen2" 3200 0                                 Screen      2  "Screen2" 3200 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"                       InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"                           InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    Option         "Xinerama" "1"                                   Option         "Xinerama" "1"
EndSection                                                      EndSection

  • That fixed that problem….
  • Now the Gnome Fallback mode provides even less configuration options than the full Gnome desktop. In particular, now that the monitors are in (physical) order, the Gnome panels are on the left-most monitor. Not useful. Finally figured out that I needed to use ‘dconf-editor’:
    • org.gnome.gnome-panel > toplevels > bottom-panel > monitor (set to 1)
    • org.gnome.gnome-panel > toplevels > top-panel > monitor (set to 1)

	
										

#Gnome 3.6#OpenSUSE 12.3#panel#triple-monitor

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