first experience with XFCE

first experience with XFCE

[Gottfried]

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Hi,
  because Cinnamon and KDE are not available
and MATE, also Enlightenment doesn’t work well on my laptop with 
additional monitor
I installed XFCE

In XFCE it is impossible to put my additonal monitor on top of the laptop.
After may be 30 attempts I somehow managed,
but after starting my laptop again,
it was changed to left and right.
XFCE manages only to have the monitor left or right of the laptop,
not at the top or (I guess bottom).

After trying again to put the monitor on top of the laptop
the system collapsed completely
I had to restart the laptop.

So that’s an Info.

But the good thing is that XFCE immediately recognises my additional 
monitor, connected via cable to the laptop.


Kind regards

Gottfried


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Re: first experience with XFCE

[Felix Lechner via]

Hi Gottfried,

On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 6:37 AM Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de> wrote:
>
> In XFCE it is impossible to put my additonal monitor on top of the laptop.

The older X system is not great when it comes to "multi-head" setups.
You can check whether you are in X (and not Wayland) by seeing if the
eyes in xeyes (from the xeyes package) follow your mouse. If they do,
you can use xrandr from the xrandr package to configure your screens.

Any graphical program you may be using in XFCE likely calls xrandr, as well.

Kind regards
Felix

Re: first experience with XFCE

[Gottfried]

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Hi,
thanks for help

1.
I run
"guix shell xeyes"

and saw that the eyes of xeyes follow the mouse.

this means I am in X (and not Wayland) in XFCE.

2.
’man xrandr’ gives me infos.

but starting xrandr in the shell says command was not found.

Does that mean that even man shows help infos for xrandr
xrandr is not installed?

or does it only show help infos if a package is installed?


Kind regards

Gottfried





Am 15.05.23 um 15:44 schrieb Felix Lechner:
> Hi Gottfried,
> 
> On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 6:37 AM Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de> wrote:
>>
>> In XFCE it is impossible to put my additonal monitor on top of the laptop.
> 
> The older X system is not great when it comes to "multi-head" setups.
> You can check whether you are in X (and not Wayland) by seeing if the
> eyes in xeyes (from the xeyes package) follow your mouse. If they do,
> you can use xrandr from the xrandr package to configure your screens.
> 
> Any graphical program you may be using in XFCE likely calls xrandr, as well.
> 
> Kind regards
> Felix

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Re: first experience with XFCE

[Christian Gelinek]

On 16/5/23 09:07, Gottfried wrote:

> 2.
> ’man xrandr’ gives me infos.
> 
> but starting xrandr in the shell says command was not found.
> 
> Does that mean that even man shows help infos for xrandr
> xrandr is not installed?
> 
> or does it only show help infos if a package is installed?

This is interesting, I just tried this myself, with the same effect: 
`man xrandr` shows the manual but trying to run it (either as my user or 
with `sudo` returns with `command not found`.

> 
> Am 15.05.23 um 15:44 schrieb Felix Lechner:
>> On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 6:37 AM Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> In XFCE it is impossible to put my additonal monitor on top of the 
>>> laptop.
>>
>> The older X system is not great when it comes to "multi-head" setups.

I'm not an expert, but I respectfully disagree: I have been using XFCE 
for several years now - initially under Xubuntu on several systems, now 
under Guix on my laptop and under Debian on both of my work PCs.

All of them use multiple monitors.  In fact, I'm writing this email on 
my monitor which is "on top of" my laptop screen at this very moment.

I'm using the default XFCE Display settings [0] to configure the 
relative positioning of my screens.

[0]: https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/display

Kind regards,
Christian

Re: first experience with XFCE

[Felix Lechner via]

Hi Christian,

On Wed, May 17, 2023 at 3:57 AM Christian Gelinek
<christian.gelinek@mailbox.org> wrote:
>
> > but starting xrandr in the shell says command was not found.

I am not sure what's happening to you folks. I have the 'xrandr'
package in my home profile [1] and it runs fine.

[1] https://codeberg.org/lechner/home-config/src/commit/243e6c1c59a23ee9560c5dfdcbf6631eb93fad19/desk.scm#L161

> > Does that mean that even man shows help infos for xrandr
> > xrandr is not installed?

Well, Guix is a bit different. What does it mean for 'xrandr' to be
installed? It's obviously in each of your /gnu/stores because XFCE
probably uses it under the hood, but it's not available in your
profile.

> > or does it only show help infos if a package is installed?

Whatever aggregates the manual pages may be more zealous than the
infrastructure that builds executable profiles. I am too new to Guix.

> This is interesting, I just tried this myself, with the same effect:
> `man xrandr` shows the manual but trying to run it (either as my user or
> with `sudo` returns with `command not found`.

You can find the manual page by running (in Bash):

  $ find `echo $MANPATH | tr : ' '` -name 'xrandr*'

Sorry about the shell scripting. That should really be in Guile.

Then you can run 'ls -al' on the resulting path. For me, it looks like

  $ ls -al ~/.guix-profile/share/man/man1/xrandr.1.gz

which produces

  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 83 Dec 31  1969
/home/lechner/.guix-profile/share/man/man1/xrandr.1.gz ->
/gnu/store/hhdalqvr3dgsapmh8n6wkha6gm6wklrx-xrandr-1.5.1/share/man/man1/xrandr.1.gz

You can probably find the xrandr executable nearby. Locally, I can run

  $ /gnu/store/hhdalqvr3dgsapmh8n6wkha6gm6wklrx-xrandr-1.5.1/bin/xrandr

which produces the customary (and lengthy) xrandr output.

> I'm not an expert, but I respectfully disagree: I have been using XFCE
> for several years now

Sorry, I didn't mean to take a position of any kind. You are right.
Xrandr is actually pretty decent.

I have used X since it was called Xfree86 and when backing store had
to be enabled manually due to the AT&T patent. [2] It's not a great
code base by any means. I thought that was universally acknowledged
but cannot find a reference right now. My comment was meant to
encourage the use of Wayland whenever possible.

I didn't mean to reflect poorly on XFCE, either. Personally, I am
still on X just like you and Gottfried, because EXWM supports only
that. My three monitors flicker every time xrandr sets them up, and
every so often some do not turn on. I have relatively old equipment,
though.

[2] https://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull12.html#SEC9

> All of them use multiple monitors.  In fact, I'm writing this email on
> my monitor which is "on top of" my laptop screen at this very moment.

I am glad it's working for you! Will you please help Gottfried?

Thanks!

Kind regards
Felix

Re: first experience with XFCE

[Gottfried]

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Hi Christian,

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.

Kind regards

Gottfried


Message: 5
Date: Wed, 17 May 2023 10:56:02 +0000
From: Christian Gelinek <christian.gelinek@mailbox.org>
To: help-guix@gnu.org
Subject: Re: first experience with XFCE
Message-ID: <a9acd6b5-1b30-5c2b-93b3-1257ea096830@mailbox.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

On 16/5/23 09:07, Gottfried wrote:

 > 2.
 > ’man xrandr’ gives me infos.
 >
 > but starting xrandr in the shell says command was not found.
 >
 > Does that mean that even man shows help infos for xrandr
 > xrandr is not installed?
 >
 > or does it only show help infos if a package is installed?

This is interesting, I just tried this myself, with the same effect:
`man xrandr` shows the manual but trying to run it (either as my user or
with `sudo` returns with `command not found`.

 >
 > Am 15.05.23 um 15:44 schrieb Felix Lechner:
 >> On Mon, May 15, 2023 at 6:37 AM Gottfried <gottfried@posteo.de> wrote:
 >>>
 >>> In XFCE it is impossible to put my additonal monitor on top of the
 >>> laptop.
 >>
 >> The older X system is not great when it comes to "multi-head" setups.

I'm not an expert, but I respectfully disagree: I have been using XFCE
for several years now - initially under Xubuntu on several systems, now
under Guix on my laptop and under Debian on both of my work PCs.

All of them use multiple monitors.  In fact, I'm writing this email on
my monitor which is "on top of" my laptop screen at this very moment.

I'm using the default XFCE Display settings [0] to configure the
relative positioning of my screens.

[0]: https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/display

Kind regards,
Christian


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Re: first experience with XFCE

[Christian Gelinek via]

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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

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;; 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)))

Re: first experience with XFCE

[Christian Gelinek]

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On 20/5/23 11:30, Christian Gelinek via wrote:
> Here is a screenshot of my Display settings page that can be found 
> inside the Settings Manager (xfce4-settings-manager):

Oops, seems like that screenshot wasn't attached, here it is again!

Kind regards,
Christian

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