[lug] KDE 4 question

[Davide Del Vento]

Folks,
I have a laptop (see hw/sw details below) which is usually connected
with a docking station with two monitors. It works ok. Being a laptop,
I want to undock it and use is by itself. So I turn the machine down,
undock, turn on, and I login into that user: the screen goes black. I
think the sucker thinks the two monitors are still attached and uses
them instead of the laptop screen.

At first I though it was a driver issue (and maybe it is - at least in
part), since I am seeing errors like "[drm: pch_irq_handler] *Error*
PCH poison interrupt" (not sure exactly when), but I wasn't convinced
because the login screen was ok, and hammering on the machine
sometimes it worked (e.g. docking and undocking it several times
repeatedly while it's on and playing with the screen settings - not
something easily done on the go). Xorg.log doesn't show anything
strange, besides a "(EE) intel(0): Couldn't create pixmap for fbcon"
which happens also when the machine it's attached to the monitors and
works, so I believe it's unrelated.

Now I created another user, I never logged in with this user while
attached to the docking station and two external monitors and it works
fine (does it rule 100% out of a driver issue? I don't know enough on
this topic).

So, what I'd like to accomplish? Using the laptop as the first user
while out of the docking station.

I unsuccessfully tried:

- before logging in, use a tty to manually switch between (what I
though was a dual-external-monitor versus a single-attached-screen
version of) plasma-desktop-appletsrc and/or plasma-desktoprc in
~/.kde/share/config/
THIS HAD NO EFFECT AT ALL

- after logging in (and X/KDE goes black), use a tty to manually force
xrandr (with the -d :0.0 option) to "turn on" the only connected
monitor
THIS PROVIDED ERRORS LIKE:
X Error off failed request:  BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
 Major opcode of failed request:  150 (RANDR)
 Minor opcode of failed request:  7 (RRSetScreenSize)
 Serial number of failed request 36
 Current serial number in output stream:  37
(note that, oddly, the screen  size was set to its minimum value of
320x200, while the connected LVDS1 was set to 1366x768 - no way to
change it, because of this BadMatch error)

- forget about the original user and use a
"laptop-with-no-external-screen user". This worked, and I could do
anything with that user, but I didn't want to replicate my settings
(e.g. for thunderbird), so I tried "xhost +; su otheruser -c
thunderbird" but this causes thunderbird spits "An error occurred
while loading or saving configuration information for thunderbird-bin.
Some of your configuration settings may not work properly.", then
freezing for 10 seconds and finally crashing (with the "GConf-WARNING
**: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon: libindicate-ERROR
**: Unable to get session bus: Timeout was reached" on the command
line)
Now I could just swear, duplicate my IMAP thunderbird settings for
this second user and be happy (I mostly do command line stuff and
browser, so...)

But then what if I use a projector? Next week I have a talk at a
conference and I am really afraid to lock the machine when the
projector is attached, so I'd like to understand what is going on
(fortunately, this time is a booth talk, so I have more time than a
podium talk, but still....)

So the questions are: do you have any clue about what is happening? Do
you know of any better file that I could swap (or delete?) instead of
plasma-desktop-appletsrc and/or plasma-desktoprc? What would you do if
you were in my shoes (all the loaner laptops I could get access to
have other hw issues: old, dying battery, not enough memory for the
presentation, large and heavy...)

HW:
from lspci
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation
Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
from Xorg.log
intel: Driver for Intel Integrated Graphics Chipsets: i810,

SW:
from uname
Linux cisl-augusta 3.0.0-13-generic #22-Ubuntu SMP Wed Nov 2 13:27:26
UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
from lsb_release
Description:    Ubuntu 11.10
from about KDE
Platform Version 4.7.2 (4.7.2)

Thanks for any suggestions,
Davide
PS: Linus wants Gnome2 back, see
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linus-torvalds-would-like-to-see-a-gnome-fork/9347
-
Me too.