Hello,
I just did a clean install of OS 13.1 with the graphics card ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6. This is a 6 display card that I setup in an array of monitors of 3 across by 2 down so I have one very big area to work on – that is I can move any window between the screens and stretch them across multiple screens as well.
I have had this setup running on OS 11.4 for years and never upgraded to 12.x because I could never get it to work. However, with 13.1 one it did, even with Linux native drivers so things are certainly getting better as on 11.4 it would only work with Catalyst (the AMD proprietary driver, currently 9.4).
However, sometimes, and pretty often, when I stretch a window across two monitors (so far I have only seen it when stretching vertically but I only got it going last night so it’s early days) the GUI will suddenly quit and in an instant I’m back into the log in screen. At first I thought it was the Linux driver so I installed AMD’s Catalyst and was running on the AMD drivers however exactly the same thing happened so it’s a bug in a layer above the hardware drivers I’m presuming.
Has anyone heard of this bug or a bug that might be this? I’m not even sure what keywords to look for to search for it or I would have done a more thorough search before asking.
Also once it happened without spanning across monitors but just when I pulled a window right to the top of the top screen which leads me to suspect it’s more something with a monitor boundary issue (probably a negative number issue if I was to hazard to guess on the programming level) than just spanning monitors.
I’ve also noticed that it seems to be far more likely if I move the mouse quickly, although again it’s early days so that just might be coincidence.
Currently I am only running under KDE even though I am used to Gnome because I couldn’t get Gnome to do a span across monitors, at least with native drivers, I haven’t tried with the AMD driver. I suspect that’s just me not knowing the new Gnome (I’m used to Gnome 2 that came with 11.4, Gnome 3 I must admit is quickly causing me to prefer KDE but that’s a personal thing and not really relevant to the problem here) more than anything however.
One last thing, I couldn’t find in Gnome or KDE where to set the screen resolution when using the linux driver, it’s not a problem with Catalyst. There was a display settings where I could set the grey scale and display layout where I could arrange multiple monitors graphically but that was it and it seems like I’m missing something in that respect. Perhaps I would need to use nomodset on the command line so it’s not all decided by the kernel? Does anyone know about this resolution settings missing as well?