HDMI Frustration

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Fedora User <fedoradch at gmail.com> wrote:
> The first time that I plugged my laptop into my HD TV, KDE (I guess it
> was KDE) provided a pop-up to configure the second monitor. It
> correctly identified it at 1920 x 1080. For some reason, my primary
> monitor also adapted to the TV setting and great portions of my desktop
> were off the margins. I could not get the sound to work.
>
> Last night I tried again. The good news is that I got HDMI digital
> sound to work. However, I could only configure the TV to 1024 x 768.
> Upon doing so my laptop screen adapted and my desktop was all scrunched
> together.
>
> This brings up two questions:
>
> 1. Why do the setting of a second monitor affect the settings of my
> primary monitor and;
>
> 2. What is preventing me from setting my second monitor to its native
> resolution of 1920x1080 (something that I successfully did in the past)?

Your display is configured to be "cloned" to the newly attached
display, which means they should display the same thing.  Of course,
the two displays have wildly different resolutions so that results in
weird behavior like you're seeing.

You need to configure your display to instead "extend" your desktop,
that is, when you move a window or your mouse off to the right, it
will move to the next monitor, instead of both attempting to display
the same thing.  To do so, open KDE's System Settings module, go to
Display and Monitor and Size and Orientation.  Set your "primary
monitor" to the one you want the KDE panel to appear on, then adjust
the "position" dropdown of the other monitor to be
"above"/"below"/otherwise adjacent to the primary monitor.  You might
also want to check the resolution settings while you're there.

> Any help would be appreciated.

-T.C.