Using HDMI with Radeon and fc17

[Alex]

Hi,

>> What is the native resolution of the HDTV?  As far as I know, Xorg
>> defaults to an extend display setup when booted with multiple displays
>> connected.  Also it doesn't do well with unequally sized displays.  I'm
>> thinking maybe the HDTV resolution is much larger than the two regular
>> displays, and the greeter happens to fall on a region outside of all the
>> displays.
>
> That shouldn't happen.
>
> With HDMI attached I get a gdm on each monitor and the display set to
> 1920x1080 (HDMI 1080p). That's what I'd expect unless I altered the
> system configuration.

No, there were no gdm's running on any display. Only one when the HDMI
port was not connected, as you would expect.

> When I log in I can then juggle the display around to have a single big
> display. Most of the desktops handle this fine although Gnome 3 has some
> annoying breakage on rotated desktops.

I generated an xorg.conf with Xorg -configure so I could set the
middle monitor to be screen0.

Outside of that I've made no changes.

> One thing to try if the greeter seems to be the problem is to login in
> comamnd line mode and type "startx"

First to explain again my situation. I have an HDMI cable to an HDTV
set up as screen0 in another room from where my computer is located.
My computer has two DVI monitors connected, screen1 and screen2.

Okay, I think the menus were somehow hidden in the upper-left corner
of the HDMI display. It only appears when I move the mouse all the way
to the upper-left and disappears again when I move the mouse. It seems
like that's the expected behavior with this new version. It also seems
that the display is a little larger than the viewable space, because
the left 1/4 of the icons are cut off.

When starting an application, it appears on the middle display. The
middle display is my 21" LCD at my desktop.

If I disconnect the HDMI cable while Xorg is running, it properly
reverts to the "Activities" menu being in the upper-left of the middle
display, the way it's supposed to be, but opening any applications
causes them to be displayed on the right-most display.

The HDMI that is connected to the HDTV is in another room. The
intention was to run a 30' HDMI cable and a 30' USB cable for another
wireless USB keyboard to the other room, so I could access my PC from
that other room.

This all works, but the behavior is really weird and seems to be unstable.

I guess it's better than nothing, and I don't have to play with
modelines like I did 15 years ago, but it's still frustrating.

Should I be using the AMD Radeon rpmfusion drivers? Is the HD5700
sufficiently supported with the default fc17?

Is there a HOWTO that describes the various other window managers and
how to install and configure them? GNOME3 (and I'd imagine KDE as
well) still suck and I'd like to think about trying something simpler.

Thanks,
Alex