Re: first experience with XFCE

[Christian Gelinek via <help-guix@gnu.org>]

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On 17/5/23 12:04, Gottfried wrote:

> I am wondering why you can  with your laptops in XFCE put monitors on 
> top of each other,
>
> but I can’t do that.
>
> It simply doesn’t work.

Sorry for the late response, I'm also not exactly sure why it does work 
for me but not for you. There are many moving parts, starting from the 
hardware, drivers and all the way up to how we install our packages.

Since I'm no expert (I wish I had Felix Lechner's knowledge of the X 
internals), I tend to keep things I don't know well as close to 
"default" as I can while trying to adapt them to my needs.

I have attached my /etc/config.scm, maybe you can find some relevant 
differences to yours.

One thing in particular that I've experienced with Guix is that some 
packages behave differently if you install them into your user profile 
vs. your system configuration and I had to move some packages into 
/etc/config.scm for them to integrate properly into my desktop environment.

Here is a screenshot of my Display settings page that can be found 
inside the Settings Manager (xfce4-settings-manager):

It shows both screens and how they are located relative to each other - 
I simply dragged the external monitor where I wanted it to be. I never 
had to touch xrandr Felix mentioned by hand directly, so I guess I'm 
lucky that it "just works" for me.

Do you have that settings page? If so, what does it show?

In the past it has happened to me sometimes that the switch next to the 
drop-down list of screens on the top-right is turned "off" for a screen 
for some reason and I had to turn it on, also I sometimes had to disable 
the "Mirror displays" checkbox so both screens work independently from 
each other.

Hope that helps!

Kind regards,
Christian

[-- Attachment #2: config.scm --]
[-- Type: text/x-scheme, Size: 2737 bytes --]

;; This is an operating system configuration generated
;; by the graphical installer.

(use-modules (gnu)
             (gnu packages linux)
             (gnu packages file-systems)
             (gnu packages disk)
             (gnu packages mtools)
             (gnu packages audio)
             (gnu packages pulseaudio)
             (gnu packages gnome)
             (gnu packages cups))
(use-service-modules
  cups
  desktop
  networking
  ssh
  xorg)

(operating-system
  (locale "en_AU.utf8")
  (timezone "Australia/Adelaide")
  (keyboard-layout
    (keyboard-layout "us" "altgr-intl"))
  (host-name "gelil14")
  (users (cons* (user-account
                  (name "chris")
                  (comment "Christian Gelinek")
                  (group "users")
                  (home-directory "/home/chris")
                  (supplementary-groups
                    '("wheel" "netdev" "audio" "video" "lp")))
                %base-user-accounts))
  (packages
    (append
      (list 
        (specification->package "nss-certs")
        cups
        dosfstools
        mtools
        ntfs-3g
        exfat-utils
        fuse-exfat
        bluez
        bluez-alsa
        pulseaudio
        gvfs
      )
      %base-packages))
  (services
    (append
      (list (service xfce-desktop-service-type)
            (service openssh-service-type)
            (service cups-service-type
              (cups-configuration
                (extensions
                  (list 
                    hplip-minimal
                    cups-filters))
                (web-interface? #t)
                (server-name host-name)
                (host-name-lookups #t)
                (default-paper-size "A4")
              )
            )
            (set-xorg-configuration
              (xorg-configuration
                (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout))))
      %desktop-services))
  (bootloader
    (bootloader-configuration
      (bootloader grub-efi-bootloader)
      (targets (list "/boot/efi"))
      (keyboard-layout keyboard-layout)))
  (swap-devices
    (list (swap-space
            (target
              (uuid "872f65aa-e7eb-4ee8-9ad1-019a0600adf3")))))
  (file-systems
    (cons* (file-system
             (mount-point "/")
             (device
               (uuid "3631ef38-b72d-481e-a305-c4c83a15fcd6"
                     'ext4))
             (type "ext4"))
           (file-system
             (mount-point "/boot/efi")
             (device (uuid "1E54-9AF7" 'fat32))
             (type "vfat"))
           (file-system
             (mount-point "/home")
             (device
               (uuid "ad8dee50-3906-4382-bba9-6f09505d475d"
                     'ext4))
             (type "ext4"))
           %base-file-systems)))