Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

Fedora Problem

26 Comments

I’m running Fedora 31 (I know, I should update to at least 32), with two monitors. One monitor is always in Workspace 3 (its primary function is to display a virtual Windows installation). Sometimes, when the machine wakes up, only the main monitor will wake up. I can activate the other one by going into settings, changing it from “Join” to “Mirror,” then reverting. But the problem with this is that, in addition to being a PITA, it for some reason jumbles up my work spaces, moving things around that I then have to rearrange the way I want them. Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Update on November 6th)]

I upgraded to 32, and the problem seems to have gone away. So I guess it wasn’t just me.

[Bumped]

26 thoughts on “Fedora Problem”

  1. Here’s a thread discussing the issue, which seems to be common, but they’re talking about Fedora 21, 22, and 23.

    A few tips they gave:

    > In *all* cases, however, I have been able to bring it back with a single
    >
    > xrandr –output DP2-2 –mode 1024×768 && xrandr –output DP2-2 –auto

    And

    xrandr –output DP2-2 –auto –primary –output DP2-3 –off –right-of DP2-2 –output eDP1 –off –left-of DP2-2 && sleep 2 && xrandr –output DP2-2 –auto –primary –output DP2-3 –auto –right-of DP2-2 –output eDP1 –auto –left-of DP2-2

    or

    # xrandr –output HDMI1 –auto –primary \
    –output eDP1 –auto –noprimary –left-of HDMI1 \
    –output DP2 –auto –noprimary –right-of HDMI1
    # xset -dpms

    1. I wouldn’t recommend a Mac. You spill something on it and you have to take it to a Mac repair place to fix it. The Mac repair place is of course going to look at your hard drive and call the FBI child exploitation people. Even though the FBI is going to bury the evidence, the Mac repair place is going to send copies of the hard drive to the press. Then the President’s friend is going to hand your drive to the State Police. Then a Senate committee is going to start looking at your drive. When does it all end? The whole republic could come crashing down around us!

      Just stick with Linux so the repair shop will instead reformat the drive and install a different OS. No FBI, no state police, no Congressional committees, no Asian sites streaming videos of you using Malia Obama’s credit card to divide up lines of coke.

      1. Imagine if one of Trump’s, Pence’s, or Palin’s kids was on video smoking meth while getting a foot job from a Chinese prostitute, would the media run the story?

      2. The customer doesn’t have this problem if he stops by and pays for the repair and retakes possession of his computer.

        1. Or if he has drive encryption turned on, for that matter.

          Though really … “I want unix on my desktop but Linux continually causes utterly bullshit problems that waste my time” is … kinda what I get from Rand’s posts, and a Mac fixes that problem.

          I don’t get the impression his desktop needs are super-heavy-duty, so … just get a Mac Mini? Maybe a used one?

          Seriously, unless someone likes playing sysadmin for free or literally cannot afford an even slightly better than bottom-spec PC, Linux is … just … why are you doing this to yourself, man?

          (Disclosure: Ran it at home as a server for over a decade. Also been running PCs since before Windows, and Macs since System 6.

          Hell, it’s 2020. You can run Linux IN WINDOWS now if you want. Your monitors should actually work correctly.)

          1. “Hell, it’s 2020. You can run Linux IN WINDOWS now if you want. Your monitors should actually work correctly.”

            Well, Linux is usually a much better host than Win10. Much more support for unusual file systems and less of a resource pig. I have both Win10 inside Linux and Linux inside Win10 and I find the former more stable and easier to maintain, so I prefer doing most things in Linux, with Win10 being used when needed. But then again, I don’t cleave to the great Red Hat side of the Linux divide. Administration of Ubuntu or Mint is pretty straightforward. But YMMV.

          2. Linux still seems kind of persnickety in its hardware support. Personally, I moved from having Ubuntu in WSL to just dedicating a NUC that had been sitting idle to it, because the support seems to be there. If I were to buy a laptop to run Linux I’d make sure I got one I knew worked well. (Now, Rand may well have done this, too, I dunno.)

    2. Michael’s remark is a joke, people.

      This is already many computer generations ago, but there was a television ad where a multi-media lecture before a large “room” was impeded by technical difficulties with a PC, members of the audience yell out suggestions such as “Edit CONFIG.SYS”, where the punchline was the last guy yelling out, “Get a Mac!”

      The entirety of commercial advertising culture is the advancement of partial truths — promotion of claims with out indicating the counter claims. The same could be said about the political establishment extending to the major news media these days. The commercial was meant to claim that the Apple Macintosh along with whatever OS it was running back then was trouble free, or at least to all of the tinkering to get PCs to do what you wanted them to do. The troubles setting up a computer and especially a PC for the visual presentation part of a talk are a meme.

      To use a car analogy to all of those earnest people saying Macs can have problems, Volvo automobiles, back in the day, had a reputation if not for reliability but for their owners keeping them a very long time, and some writing to a car advice column in Popular Mechanics or some such place asked whether purchasing a new Volvo was a good decision.

      The reply was, “Not particularly. Volvo’s can be trouble — Swedish trouble.” Don’t know if this was a microaggression against persons of Swedish heritage, but I think what it meant is that in differing from American cars, Volvos weren’t trouble free, rather, they had troubles that were specific to that import brand, which could include finding parts and qualified service shops.

      Similarly, Macs can have unique kinds of trouble specific to their commercial “eco system.” Like pre-mid-1970 Volvos, still, they have a reputation of if not reliability, at least dedicated owners.

  3. I’m going to take a wild guess and ask if the second display is attached via DisplayPort to an Nvidia card? If so, and you have the option, try connecting via a non-DP port. There seems to be a hardware problem with some older Nvidia cards and DP which results in the monitor fully powering down the DP connection on sleep, resulting in the OS thinking the monitor has been unplugged, and thus reallocating windows and such to active displays.

    Note for the OS warriors here that I’ve seen this problem on Mac and Windows too. I’ve not seen it with my recent AMD GPU, and Nvidia may have fixed it in later cards.

    1. Not Nvidia card. One monitor is on HDMI and the other on DVI (with an HDMI converter). There is no DisplayPort. Now I’m wondering if just upgrading my graphics card will solve the problem.

      1. Could it be that the Windows VM is asleep and that’s why second monitor doesn’t wake up?

        As far as your windows rearranging, that’s typical. You effectively took away one monitor, so the OS moves everything to fit on the display area you have left. Windows will do the exact same thing. It would be a lot worse if it DIDN’T rearrange stuff.

        1. I’ve found on Ubuntu that it is very useful to have the Win10 VM in one virtual desktop and then set up the VM to never go blank. When the Win10 screensaver kicks in, it tends to mess things up. I don’t use multiple monitors, so I can’t comment on that. If Fedora uses the gnome desktop, you might want to hide the VM in a normally inactive desktop and just go to it as needed.

  5. Someone else in a forum said this. No details on the xrandr thing so you’d have to try to figure out elsewhere what they’re doing, but you could try the key sequence.

    It looks like a LOT of people are having this, mostly on Fedora, but not exclusively, so switching distros may not help.

    I have an xrandr script that configures my docking arrangement (leftof, rightof, primary etc.). This
    *sometimes* works.

    When it doesn’t I’ve found that alt-ctrl-f2 / alt-ctrl-f1 does the trick.

  7. I do enjoy these discussions of your Unix system – which I believe you use for convenience?

    I’m not a Windows fanboy, but since my automagic update to Vista, windows has remained pretty much trouble-free for me, up through the current version of Win X. It’s taken MS two and a half decades to get there, but it’s happened…

    Unix – the operating system of the future! Since 1970! ONWARD!

  8. As I remember someone commenting (not from here) a few decades back when Fedora was split off as the zero cost version of RedHat.
    Forever Beta

  9. Have you considered not using Linux? I mean, look at how many blog posts you’ve written about problems with Linux.

    2. I maybe write a blog post about Linux once or twice a year. Based on my own (both ancient and recent) Windows experience and that of others (including Patricia’s computer, because she insists on M$), I’m sure that I’d have problems more often than that. And a) I’ve never found Macs in any way intuitive, and b) I’m not going to pay the Apple premium.

          1. Well you COULD just use RedHat. That’s Fedora dumbed down just enough to be stable. So what’s the issue there Rand? Cost? A deep desire for new fangled things you don’t use? I believe the clinical term for that is featuritis. To wit I’ve come to the realization that either one of the two above is the case and as a follower of this blog, have resigned myself to posts such as these about twice a year. Probably the statistical average for all Fedora users. 🙂

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