Starting X on a second monitor - kludge that works

["Mark Fisher" <mark dot fisher at practiv dot com>]

Hi.
 
I've been trawling the archives looking for a solution to the
problem of starting Xwin on a second monitor.

The only way I've been able to get this to work is to
use a program that allows you to send the app to a 2nd monitor.
The program in question is UltraMon.

If your second monitor is a different size to your primary, then
no fear, just specify the size of the screen when starting x.

I've just ported xfce4.2 to cygwin, and start it like this:

bash --login -c "/opt/xfce4/bin/startxfce4 -- -nodecoration -screen 0 1280
1024"

(this I run as a batch file using either the /usr/X11R6/bin/run
to hide the window, or a free program I found called "runhide")

which opens then screen at my 2nd monitor's resolution (but
on the primary monitor), then on the task bar, RMB on the app,
choose "Move to other monitor".

For those of you fortunate enough to have a radeon gfx card
(my last job used dell's with radeon cards), then the native
gfx drivers allow this kind of functionality too.

anyone found another method for doing this?

I quite like XFCE on my 2nd monitor. Now to port firefox using gtk
under cygwin...

Mark Fisher