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Summary

I just bought a new monitor and I am trying to get it to play nicely with my linux laptop. At the moment I can only get output to appear on at most the laptop screen, my new display and one of my old displays. I am trying to get output to appear on my new display and two of my old displays, and not the laptop screen.

In other words

  • Turn off output for laptop internally connected display
  • Turn on output for one additional external display
  • Sort the rotations / positions correctly

I have tried using the XFCE Display settings in Settings Manager, but this thing is hopeless at dealing with strange configurations.

I then tried with arandr, which was a bit easier to use because you can move the screens with the mouse without restriction, however when trying to apply the new configuration it failed.

  • arandr error code: XRandR returned error code 1: xrandr: Configure crtc 2 failed

I'm not super familiar with xrandr, I only started reading about it today but I think this is the more flexible method which I probably need to use.

Details

Hardware Details:

  • CPU: Intel Core i7-3630QM
  • Integrated graphics: Intel HD 4000, supports 3 displays apparently, can't find any info on maximum resolution, but appears to be able to drive 4k displays at 60 Hz, presumably that's why it has a DP connector attached to it.

Software Details:

  • Debian 10 (I think?)
  • XFCE 4.something, I can find out the something if it is important
  • Using Intel driver (probably - NVidia one only runs if I use bumblebee/primusrun <exec_name>)

Maybe it would work better if I could somehow force use of the NVidia driver for all scenarios including desktop rendering, but probably not since the hardware for the display outputs is wired up to the Intel GPU chip, not the NVidia card.

Monitor Details:

  • Primary display, resolution 3440x1440, 60 Hz.
  • Next display is to the right of primary display, left rotated, resolution 1920x1080, 60 Hz
  • Final display is to the right again, left rotated as well, resolution 1920x1080, 60 Hz

Because of the weird combination of resolutions and rotations, obviously the two panels to the right of primary display require some kind of vertical offset.

What I've tried

I don't quite understand this deal of virtual displays, but my guess would be I need some kind of virtual display which is a size of (3440+1080+1080) x 1920. Is that correct? Then I need to tell xrandr that I have a single primary display with some vertical offset relative to the virtual display, and then another 2 left rotated displays with some horizontal offset relative to the first?

I've read a couple of pieces of documentation, such as

However none of these provided enough detail for me to fully understand what I need to do to make my configuration work.

Screenshot of one attempt with arandr, error code was XRandR returned error code 1: xrandr: Configure crtc 2 failed.

I attempted to enable HDMI1 after getting DP3 and HDMI2 working. I made the resolution for HDMI1 640x480. I also tried with 1920x1080.

arandr

What I was able to get working

  • Primary 3440x1440 display + laptop display + 1 other HDMI/DVI connected display
  • Laptop display + 2x HDMI/DVI 1080p displays
  • Laptop display + Primary 3440x1440 display

Why?

In case you are wondering... why do I have this weird and awkward setup?

  • I already had a Laptop with 1x DP out, 1x DVI out and 1x HDMI out, so I figured I can connect 3 external monitors to it.
  • I already owned 2x 1080p 27 inch screens which I bought 4 years ago during black friday cheaply.
  • I recently invested in a superwide/ultrawide display, and so far I'm very happy with it. As the primary display the bar containing the window buttons widget is really long which makes it easy to see details of windows when you have many open at once.
  • I work with code extensively, so I want to be able to use the 2 1080p displays in vertical/portrait orientation so I can see many lines of code at once.
  • It's a bit weird that the scaling between one display and the other two is wrong but I can live with it and I'm too poor to simply buy another 2 1440p monitors to replace them.
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