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I have to monitors, one attached to my Nvidia graphics card using HDMI, the other one using VGA (using a DVI-VGA adapter). Most fullscreen games (that even recognizes that there are two monitors) uses the secondary monitor. The primary monitor is correctly set when I check from nvidia-settings, xrandr or KDE system settings.

My current workaround is to simply disable monitor 2 when playing a game but that's not satisfiying. How can I effectively set the primary screen?

Nova
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  • Does setting the primary with `xrandr` help? – derobert Apr 04 '13 at 21:20
  • `xrandr` already reports that it is. I guess it gets the info from the same source as the other tools. – Nova Apr 04 '13 at 22:15
  • Could this depend on the position of the mouse pointer at the time the application goes fullscreen? – peterph Apr 05 '13 at 07:45
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    Depends on the game and its implementation, I guess. There are other things, like the gnome-panel ... mate-panel these days ... which defines that monitor as primary which is reported first _by the graphics board_. Stupid and wrong implementation, but true. Maybe your games support some command line arguments for placement and/or monitor selection? – Bananguin Apr 05 '13 at 09:32

1 Answers1

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While I haven't been able to actually keep both screens enabled, I can at least map games to the correct screen. What I did was change the 'metamode' line in xorg.conf:

Option         "metamodes" "CRT: 1280x1024 +1920+180, DFP: nvidia-auto-select +0+0; DFP: 1920x1200, CRT: NULL"

I'm not entirely sure what the first part does, it was autogenerated by nvidia-settings. The second part however instructs the driver to realize a request for 1920x1200 resolution -- the native resolution of my primary screen, DFP -- by disabling the secondary one (CRT).

Those games that were well-behaved to begin with never actually changed the resolution to begin with but instead created a full-screen sized borderless window and placed it on the primary screen.

EDIT: This doesn't work as well as I thought, the mode isn't switched back properly later.

Nova
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