[mythtv-users] Looking for Dual Head Help

[John Welch]

One of my systems is what I will call a multi-purpose system.  I am
running Fedora 10 with a dual-DVI nVidia 8600GT graphics card.  My
primary display is a Samsung 20" LCD, where I do general tasks such as
web surfing, email, office documents, etc.  The secondary display is
an AOC 32" LCD HDTV that I use as a display for Mythtv.  I've been
happily running along using a Xinerama setup and everything has been
working great.  However, since Fedora 10 has upgraded to KDE 4.2 I've
really been enjoying the desktop effects and various other "eye candy"
on my F10 PC at work.  I'd like to enable these desktop effects on
this "multi-purpose" PC at home, but KDE won't allow it with Xinerama
enabled (at least I can't figure out how to do it).  I've been trying
to change my setup so that I'm not using Xinerama, but still have the
same general setup where I can run my general purpose stuff on one
display and Mythtv on the HDTV.  I've read the "Running MythTV Dual
Headed" wiki, searched around on both the Mythtv mailing lists and
Google, but thus far have not been able to accomplish what I'm trying
to do.  The closest I've come is using an 'xorg.conf' similar to what
is described in the "PIP Display" section to the dual headed wiki
page.  However, it is not quite working the way I want.  I can get the
Myth frontend to display on the HDTV, but if I switch the mouse and
keyboard focus back to the primary display I can't figure out how to
eventually put it back to the frontend and I end up having to kill the
process instead of exiting out properly.  I don't know if I don't
understand the "mouse jail" program that is described in the wiki, or
whether it isn't working right on my system.

So, anyone get any suggestions on how I can make this work?  I think
what I want is two separate X servers each controlling one display,
but I can't figure out the proper xorg.conf for this configuration.  I
have read the section in the wiki page describing this setup, but it
is just not clicking with me.  Ideally I'd like to be able to use both
displays at the same time, like I can do now with my Xinerama setup,
but this is not absolutely essential as most of the time I'm really
only use one display or the other.

Note that while any suggestions are welcome, any "dump KDE"
suggestions will only be tried as a last resort, as I really would
like to stick with KDE.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
John