Xorg dual-head fail

[Ahmed Kamal]

A software developer gets a new HDMI monitor to connect to his laptop .. he
connects the HDMI output to the laptop .. no notification, nothing pops up
..  mmm .. he searches through the menus for something .. Screen resize n
rotate (krandrtray) looks promising ... he plays with it, it gets the 2
monitors mirrored, but he wants to spread the desktop on them both, tens of
clicks here and there .. it's not going anywhere ... he calls the local
linux guru, which happens to be me. I play with krandr too, nothing .. I
appologize for having to use cli tricks, I open up konsole, and fire-up
xrandr, after some time to get the 11 word xrandr command just about right
... Xrandr fails to set the display and bitches about some virtual-size
thingie .. googling reveals I need "Virtual" directive in xorg.conf .. mm ..
ok, I vim xorg.conf .. but it's not there ... ah, everything in newer fedora
should be automatic, heh, I remember. Ok .. so I need to create an xorg.conf
.. I launch system-config-display .. set the dual-head option there (how
didnt I think of that one before) .. couple of clicks .. save the config ..
oops, some "index out of range" error spits on the konsole screen and the
tool just hangs there .. no error messages that there were some errors
saving, nothing ... ick ... xorg.conf was not created! I give
system-config-display another shot .. it crashes the exact way again ... doh
.. (at this stage I should already be cursing .. but I'm not :) I launch
system-config-display one third time with --no-ui option to create some
boiler plate xorg.conf, this time it works .. I add the needed "Virtual"
thingie ... I set it to 4096x4096 .. restart X .. it fails to start
completely ... no graceful recovery :/ I reboot the box ... X doesn't start
again .. no errors .. doesn't take me back to console .. just a pretty black
blank screen! Reboot again, runlevel 3 .. tweak Virtual .. init 5 .. X
starts. I finally login .. run "xrandr" and tweak the command .. now things
start to look good again. I make the user a shell alias, tell him to type it
whenever that monitor is attached to his laptop ... end of my story!

Does something as common as attaching an extra monitor to a laptop, require
that much voodoo ..! How would a "normal" user react ! I wont try to mention
how to resolve the problems mentioned here, since you guys know this better
than I do ... I'm not whining either, I'm simple mentioning somthing is
definitely wrong, with the hope of spurring action to make things better

Regards
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