I need to install a new Linux/Gnu OS soon. The present one, Linux Mint (Mate) Debian edition no longer fills my needs. I run 4 screens with 3 X sessions. Mate worked great for this, then an update broke it to one screen. I tried Cinnamon but it won't even start on multiple X sessions. XFCE works but with some serious drawbacks although that may be caused by my current system. Enlightenment actually worked well until it started crashing and I had to restore the settings file. When it finally crashed so nothing got it to run again I gave up on it.
I need a OS with multimedia support, the ability to install programs that may not be in the repositories ( Mythtv ), and multi X screen support. I am also looking for a file manager that has something like Gnome scripts. I have fair command line skills. I presently have Nvidia cards but I will go shopping if I have to. I might try Xinerama but I usually watch one screen while switching the other 2's desktops. Also not having a menu on all screens would be a pain.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26 2019, @05:43PM (4 children)
Out of curiosity, have you done any debugging to determine what might be causing the problem?
Checking out some or all of the following may help:
contents of ~/.xsession-errors
contents of /var/log/Xorg.[display#].org
output of 'lspci'
output of 'dmesg'
contents of /var/log/messages
Here are some resources that might give you some insight into the issue:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting [ubuntu.com]
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/MonitorDetection [ubuntu.com]
https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/ServerDebugging/ [x.org]
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=159476 [archlinux.org]
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/xtruss/ [greenend.org.uk]
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/XTesting/ [freedesktop.org]
Have fun!
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @06:29PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 26 2019, @08:04PM (2 children)
I was focusing on this:
As for Mythtv, the relevant repositories have the latest (v0.30) available, so unless you have specific hacks you need to include in your Mythtv builds, the repositories should work well for you.
As for copy/pasting between screens, is each screen a different login session/desktop (when it works), or are you sharing all four screens in one desktop session?
If it's the former, it would make sense that the copy/paste buffers wouldn't be shared, but certainly not in the latter.
Regardless, having tools/info for troubleshooting is a good thing.
Even if you're just going to move to another distro, you never know when they might come in handy.
As an aside, I run Mythtv 0.30 from the RPM Fusion [rpmfusion.org] repositories on Fedora 30 (frontend is Mate, backend doesn't run X) with a frontend using VAAPI [wikipedia.org] support enabled on a Cherry Trail SoC [wikichip.org] which renders 1080p pretty flawlessly via HDMI.
Fedora Core is *not* an LTS distro, which might be a negative for you, but there are many other distros which do have LTS versions, with both .deb and .rpm package management.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by pjbgravely on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:36PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 26 2019, @09:43PM
I hope you find something that meets your needs.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr