I run a Desktop computer with Ubuntu Intrepid 64 and have successfully installed XBMC on it. I have two screens connected. One 22" computer screen through VGA and one 32" 1366x768 TV screen through HDMI. I run theese two screens as "Seperate X screens", configured in NVIDIA X Server Settings. My driver version is 180.22. My 22" is defined as "screen 0" and my TV is "screen 1". All is good.
However, I'm having trouble running XBMC in full screen on my TV. On my computer screen this is no problem. I open XBMC in my computer screen, press | and everything fits perfectly within the frame and it covers the whole screen. On my TV it simply won't run anything else than windowed mode. If I press | for full screen, the image in the window changes it's size and gets way out of center, but the size of the window frame itself stays the same. The closest I get to full screen is to maximize the window and delete the top and bottom panel. This will still show the window border and of course is not real full screen.
Does anyone have a clue on what's going on? I guess I could settle for a solution that will have the window borders outside the screen and that way always run XBMC as a maximized window. I will not use my TV screen for running anything else than XBMC anyway. To solve the issue for what's really the issue here, would be preferable though.
Thanks for any help!
Have you tried setting your 32" as the primary display and the 22" as the secondary display? Sometimes video cards will not treat both displays equally and put all the "power" into the primary display. In my experience with building HTPCs throughout the years I've found that they've never really worked well when being output to a secondary monitor. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I've never found a way to get it to work well with any HTPC software I've used.
Thanks! I'll give that a go. Hopefully that wont bring other issues with other apps along. I\ll post back here with whatever results I get.
I can confirm that this solution solved the problem.
However, a couple of new ones showed up. The login window now shows up on (what for me is) the wrong screen. For some reason some directories under "Places" opens in screen 0 only, with nautilus. I think these issues can be solved though. Hopefully there won't be many more.
I will take issues further to ubuntuforums.org, if google can't help me out.
Hey, I have a question. If you have XBMC set to run on your primary X screen, how do you get past the cursor issue? When I did this, I would not have a cursor on my other (secondary) screen.
My setup was like this -- TV screen at 1080p as primary X screen -- 15" touchscreen as secondary X screen. My idea was to run Firefox on the touchscreen, and use the web GUI to control XBMC on the main TV screen. I failed to get this working when the cursor problem stumped me.
Ideally, I would like to see Xinerama support in XBMC, such that one instance of XBMC can dominate the larger screen (which will usually be people's TVs), with a smaller control panel showing on the other screen, that users can use to control what is happening on the larger screen.
Or, alternatively, a change in the nVidia drivers that would allow for scaled cloning (so that the large screen could be 1080p while the smaller cloned screen could use a different resolution, like 1024x768, or whatever).
This have never been an issue to me. As soon as I set up two separate X screens and rebooted, it was just a matter of moving the cursor out to the right of screen 0 and it would show up in screen 1. Just as one would expect. I'm not sure I've ever tried to move the cursor out of the screen while running xbmc in full screen. I could give it a go, but right now I can't get xbmc to work as it shuts down on me with the error: Segmentation fault (core dumped).
By the way. There were just to many issues with running my TV as my primary screen, so I changed back. Some things would appear only on the primary screen, no matter what. The gnome panels would have bugs on the secondary screen. I'm no longer convinced that these issues can be dealt with easily, and they made the system a lot less user friendly. This all means that I have to leave xbmc, unless there is a way to run it properly in full screen on the secondary screen. So, any help is still most welcome.
Hoyland84 Wrote:This have never been an issue to me. As soon as I set up two separate X screens and rebooted, it was just a matter of moving the cursor out to the right of screen 0 and it would show up in screen 1. Just as one would expect. I'm not sure I've ever tried to move the cursor out of the screen while running xbmc in full screen. I could give it a go, but right now I can't get xbmc to work as it shuts down on me with the error: Segmentation fault (core dumped).
I guess the reason it was an issue for me is (a) I have only a touchscreen -- no mouse, so I cannot get the cursor from the primary screen (tapping on the touchscreen did not bring it over, and (b) I always run XBMC in fullscreen mode -- on my primary monitor.
Hoyland84,
You might want to try to install KDE. The KWin window manager allows for an extreme granularity of how a window should appear whenever it's is opened. An association to the application can be made and whenever it's opened the window can open maximized without a border for instance. KWin has many many more options that can be played with.
Also another thing, the resolution at which XBMC goes full screen is defined in the settings, and not by X. Double check and make sure that resolution isn't setup for your other monitor.
Also, KWin can also set an application to always open on a certain Screen in a Certain location.