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FernetMenta – unsure what you mean with extended desktop. Do you mean spanning desktop? One large res. for X?
I didn't realize that multiple X screens was something the Intel driver would have to support explicitly, thought it certainly explains why no
matter how much the X config was tweaked it still was using one, i.e ":0.0" display.
However, the reason I wanted it to be separate is because –
a) window focus (for keyboard input) gets lost. This is one of the minor issues, as it can be fixed by simply clicking on the minimized XBMC instance.
b) XBMC (or X) is grabbing the pointer (even when passing the '-nocursor' option) and trying all kinds of workarounds (wmctrl, etc.) to prevent this behaviour is ineffective
and most importantly–
c) The screens get switched around–i.e, although the xbmc.bin process is running (with the -standalone -fs opts), X tends
to want to show a basic screen backdrop if you try to do anything useful on the other display.
So there really is no way to run separate X screens on Intel? Since I was seeing (major) tearing when using the most recent HD4000 01.org drivers,
it looks like the resolution for the old LCD is interfering in some way.
Really can't see why this should be so hard on Linux (which is what I use the most). However, I did run XBMC 12.2 on OSX with another built in Intel GPU (HD3000) and it works flawlessly–simply start XBMC once, tell it to use HDMI2, then every time that port is connected it launches seamlessly and lets you use the regular desktop as usual.
Maybe I'll have to switch to Wayland.