Re: Dual monitors on Pi5

On 26/06/2025 15:00, bp@www.zefox.net wrote:

When the Pi5 dual monitor setup first started up and worked the popup
help menus displayed by mousing over the icons on the top menu bar
appeared close to the icon and cursor, as normal. This is under the
default pixel/x11 windowing system.
 Now, roughly a week later, mousing over the menu items (displayed
on HDMI0) reveals the popups, but on HDMI1, which doesn't even have
a menu bar displayed. Invoking the Screen Configuration application
shows the correct monitor identification, so the Pi isn't confused
about which screen is which.

Menu bar? Do you mean the panel? It is normally only set to be visible on one monitor.

Still, there's a sort of emphasis on HDMI 1 for things like unblanking.
If the host has blanked both screen and the mouse moves, the first to
light up is HDMI1. I expected it to be HDMI0, since that's the primary
monitor. Didn't check this until now, so can't if it's new or old.

The primary monitor is only used for placement of things such as panels. The order of it unblanking is purely down to how long it takes each monitor to detect the signal and come out of sleep mode. Even with two seemingly identical monitors they don't both come on at exactly the same time.

As it happens, for space reasons I've placed the "extra" monitor to the
left of the "main" monitor. The default arrangement was clearly to add
the second monitor to the right of the first monitor so it was necessary
to manually correct the arrangement. It appears that somewhere in the
software a vestigal default position has not been overridden by Screen
Configuration.

All saved coordinates for windows are from the origin of the left most screen, so if that is the one you use optionally windows are going to move around.
Until I got identical home and work monitor setups, I wrote a Python program to move them to their expected position on differing number and sizes of monitors when the laptop was in each location.
---druck