11.2 GNOME Dual Desktop nVidia Issues

I’m not sure how much this helps, but I’m all about the openSUSE project, and want to find some light on this… What I’m trying to do is specifically a dual desktop / extended desktop on GNOME in 11.2…

I have a desktop with a 8600 Nvidia… Been struggling with dual desktop - worked like a charm in 11.1 (except occasional ComPiz freezes)… No longer is any monitor configuration under Yast. (Also, I notice that kernel is “desktop” and not “default” ?)

KDE worked fine for dual desktop - but then of course if you like KDE, you must have an understanding of where to go when there are too many places to set everything… I toyed with it for a bit, then had to go back to my fav - GNOME.

I was pleasantly surprised by default after loading my home profile into GNOME that WITHOUT nVidia drivers, it defaulted to a dual desktop! Never seen that before, right on… However, no special effects, which is something I require for my setup. Knew I needed to install real nVidia drivers…

I installed the proper 11.2 nVidia drivers, reboot… Came back… No dual desktop, went to look in usual place - YAST & Control Center… Settings for YAST are gone in 11.2, and in Control Center, couldn’t even see second monitor. Finally had a thought that this new version may be trying to be clever and have an app associated… Sure enough, inside Applications is the nVidia Control Panel.

I wrestled with many settings here and tried reboots… What finally works for me (for now), is that this has to be set in a live session. I can’t find a way to save a startup config in this. If you hover over “Quit”, it says it “saves to your home dir nVidia config file and quits”. However upon editing, I don’t see any of these settings being saved in that file. A reboot confirms that it reverts to a single monitor setting. I also tried hitting “Save to X Configuration File”… Everytime I try to select that the window freezes and I must kill it (tried after several reboots).

So moral of the story as far as I can see for now:

  • You must set your settings manually after a reboot (can’t find a way to make persistent, if anyone knows, please explain!)
  • Goto Applcations → NVIDIA X Server Settings
  • Click 2nd down on left “X Server Display Config”
  • Adjust your layout as necessary, make sure to choose “TwinView” under the “Configure…” button
  • Hit “Apply.” For me, this creates the screens I want. I can click “Quit” and go about my business and everything looks great…
  • Caveat - after reboot, all of this is gone and reset - nothing saved! …Just have to set this up again anytime I reboot…

I hope this is indeed an issue others are seeing too and can be fixed for 11.2.000000001. For now, simply replaying that exercise after a restart does the trick for me. Luckily it shouldn’t be too often for a linux system…

MORE than happy to hear any other solutions to this, please explain if any ideas!

Thanks

You have to run nvidia-settings as root: “sudo nvidia-settings”, or else any changes to xorg.conf will not be saved.

Thanks, indeed that did the trick! Nvidia hopefully will understand this caveat and require you to enter root privileges to edit on future versions…