Hello,
i’m trying to have an extended desktop on my kubuntu 12.04 (kernel 3.2.0-39-generic) and can’t succeed.
I only have a green screen and plugable device (or screen connected on) doesn’t appear in systemsettings window.
So I know i’ve read something on this problem a month ago, but can’t find where on the internet (perhaps on this forum, but can’t find), so are there some news / workarounds / fixes for that problem ?
I’m interested even in experimental stuff (i’m not affraid about compilation, script kiddy…)
thanks in advance for replying !
Hi Mathieu,
Thanks for posting your question here about using multiple monitors on your kubuntu installation, I’ll try to help. Unfortunately until support for extended desktops on USB monitors is built-in to your distribution there isn’t a clear way to get it working.
Support for multiple monitors over USB on Linux is growing and is currently available in Fedora 18. If it’s possible to switch to Fedora, you should be able to run multiple monitors spanning USB and PCI graphics.
I hope this helps, sorry I don’t have a better answer for your Kubuntu system.
Thanks,
Jerome.
Plugable Technologies
Hi Jerome
Nevermind for my distro, but could you post here more information about fedora support (some links ? code ? sources ?)
i’ve found this post on your forum :
http://support.plugable.com/plugable/…
really interesting (specialy the youtube video), but not really helpfull
i’ve also found some interesting project :
http://www.afiestas.org/kscreen-0-1-a…
thks
i come back here with almost the same question, i’ve now kde 4.10 and kscreen and libkscreen working like a charm, but I still can’t add a 3rd screen as already mentionned. Any news about this ?
Hi Mathiue,
Sorry, no – everything related to multiple monitors or multiple terminals on Linux right now is very distro dependent (and spins within distros). Frankly, it’s a disaster. It’s not just GDM vs. KDE, but also systemd vs. sysvinit, X vs. Wayland, fbdev vs. DRM, etc, etc… The APIs and UIs are completely balkanized, and combinations that do work are very version dependent.
The only hope is that some combination of components will win adoption by all the major distros, so most development and test energy can be focused there. But right now, there’s more forking than merging happening, so things are actually going in the opposite direction.
So things will work in some very narrow combination of hardware and software (e.g. on Fedora 18 under specific circumstances), but there isn’t enough energy in the community to invest in all possible combinations of competing components.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I don’t want to set any unrealistic expectations. This is frustrating for everyone.
Bernie
thanks for your reply Bernie, nervermind, as far as I can remember, that’s always like that in the open source world, a merry mess :-). I’m confident enough about the evolution for this. So, could you indicate me some way to have more than 2 monitors ? Does another plugable device work nice with linux for this purpose ?
Hi Mathieu,
I don’t know of any device to recommend, because the problems aren’t really at the device level, they’re more at the high level of supporting multiple graphics cards (of any type or technology) within Linux.
If you can find a solution that appears to be a single graphics card to Linux, but supports 3+ monitors, that would be the best way to avoid Linux’s limitations.
But we don’t sell anything like that, and I’m not aware of any. Years ago, you had the Matrox type solutions, but I don’t know if they’re supported today:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questio…
Bernie
ok, i found some stuff on ubuntu forums and documentations, will give a try later. Thanks for your reply 
If you have a chance, we’d love a reply back here if you find any solutions that work well for typical usage scenarios!
ok, i will post here if I find something working well
Hi here, so i post almost 2 years later, but I give another try to plugable uga-2k-a on kubuntu 14.04 with kde 4.13.3 and kernel 3.16.0-40-low-latency.
I succeed in configuring a third screen (recognized and set via kscreen in the defautl kde system settings pannel).
BUT, it’s really slow. Too slow so I just can’t use it. So I wonder if some tweak could improve this ?