Zarfy - Change Screen Resolution Gui - MultiMonitor Support

[Puppus Dogfellow]

i had a similar problem with one of my machines. i dragged the zarfy icon from user/bin into startup as a symlink and now zarfy engages as the desktop is coming on--problem solved.


jpeps pet http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=64464 will back up and restore the desktop...

also, on an older setup, i once couldn't get the dual monitor setup to work correctly until i installed gr&r. it seemed to help the computer get a handle on things, though the positioning was ultimately done with zarfy.

hope this helps.

[disciple]

I'd suggest trying arandr.

[joaomcteixeira]

Hi there!
Very very nice app! Thank you still working under Upup Raring!

Just for curiosity, is there any new version of it?

thx

[disciple]

I think zarfy has been unmaintained for years now.

[joaomcteixeira]

correct,

anyway, for now it is still working fine

nonetheless, if some day it ceases to work because puppy itself changes, please consider in updating it. It is a really nice app

best wishes

[ozboomer]

i had a similar problem with one of my machines. i dragged the zarfy icon from user/bin into startup as a symlink and now zarfy engages as the desktop is coming on--problem solved.

I'd just add that after you've run zarfy manually once, you can make a little script to run zarfy -l and that will load your most recent configuration and exit, so the program will not remain on your screen.

This is a useful little workaround for now... but I'm still investigating randr and other tools mentioned in the zarfy source and our Puppy wiki:

http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/zarfy

Thanks for the help.

[Puppus Dogfellow]

i had a similar problem with one of my machines. i dragged the zarfy icon from user/bin into startup as a symlink and now zarfy engages as the desktop is coming on--problem solved.

I'd just add that after you've run zarfy manually once, you can make a little script to run zarfy -l and that will load your most recent configuration and exit, so the program will not remain on your screen.

This is a useful little workaround for now... but I'm still investigating randr and other tools mentioned in the zarfy source and our Puppy wiki:

http://www.puppylinux.org/wikka/zarfy

Thanks for the help.

cool. does that mean a text file that starts (and ends) "# zarfy -l" placed in startup instead of the symlink to usr/bin/zarfy?

any suggestions on the easiest way to automate/obviate the moving of the menu bar to the top and then back to the bottom after everything loads? (seems the only way i can get it out of the middle--it always starts in the middle, but at least the screens no longer start off boxed off and reversed. with this new trick, i'd have one less "okay" box to click, though i kinda get a kick out of the jwm dialogs popping up. learning this stuff is fun...).


regarding what i said earlier about grandr--it worked well for me pre 5.6, but it caused odd behavior in two out of two 5.7 installs, so now i'd advise avoiding it.

that desktop restore pet i posted seems to work for the icons, but not for the monitors themselves.

[ozboomer]

cool. does that mean a text file that starts (and ends) "# zarfy -l" placed in startup instead of the symlink to usr/bin/zarfy?

Acshually, it's more like:-

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
zarfy -l

...add the normal permissions (that I can't remember for the life of me at the moment) to the file containing those lines ... and symlink THAT file into the Startup folder.

I've yet to explore the XRandR options yet...

[Puppus Dogfellow]

cool. does that mean a text file that starts (and ends) "# zarfy -l" placed in startup instead of the symlink to usr/bin/zarfy?

Acshually, it's more like:-

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
zarfy -l

...add the normal permissions (that I can't remember for the life of me at the moment) to the file containing those lines ... and symlink THAT file into the Startup folder.

I've yet to explore the XRandR options yet...

better to have forgotten the normal permissions than to have no idea what the phrase means. yup, your code changes the icon from a text page to a text page with a terminal on it. thanks.

i remember early on (i'm new to linux--xp crashed, got jolicloud as a why not, found out it was faster and really ubuntu, discovered puppy, stayed/converted all my machines) being annoyed at how the monitor and monitoring didn't seem to work as well out of the box as what i saw from gnome/ubuntu (wonder how much of a chore it would be for someone to package for puppy whatever that was--i saw in my limited stint with Mint that they used it too...liked their (connected) process monitor as well, but apparently seeming integrated and being integrated are what that Unity thing is all about, so i'm figuring you can take just that, maybe download it from the PPM...), and searching for all the BlankRandRs i could, xrandr among them. i kept grandr and zarfy because they provided the fewest headaches, and now i'm down to one option, but sometimes it seems like half these programs are just different faces on the same set of hands, and this was prior to easy access to the ubuntu repos. anyway, post what you find and thanks for the script. it's the exclamation point after the pound sign that makes it a script to the machine? are these bash scripts or shell scripts or what?

ps sorry for all the questions/hijacking your thread, but i'm on the cusp of "programming."

pps: after that, can i just tell the machine to raise and lower the menu bar?

reload the wall paper?

[ozboomer]

I've done some more experimenting lately and this is what I've found:-

• *** If I run xrandr manually, I can set-up the screen in the same way that zarfy does... and it's something that I can 'maintain' betwen the versions of Puppy.
  
  However, running xrandr manually has a strange drawback: After running it, using the menu option for shutdown doesn't work - X is not terminated. I can site there for 20 minutes and nothing will happen.
  
  If, however, I do the ol' CTRL-ALT-BS, and manually terminate X, the shutdown command immediately comes to life and is running and the PC shuts down.

• *** Trying to modify xorg.conf manually and have Puppy use it seems to be pretty fruitless, as it appears 'xwin' and/or 'startx' scripts have some intimate relationship with 'xorgwizard' and the xorg.conf I modify and put in place is always trashed with some automatically generated version.

The commands I now have in my Startup script are now:-

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --mode 1920x1080 --rate 60 \
       --output VGA-1 --right-of DVI-I-1 --mode 1280x720 --rate 60

...so I don't have to install/run some extra application (ie zarfy)... but there's now this problem with shutdown (mentioned above).

I've yet to fully explore 'xwin', 'startx' or 'xorgwizard'... but the threads in this forum that discuss the problem generally suggest you need to do some significant... 'tailoring'... of any/every version of Puppy to have a (manually) customizable xorg.conf file that will be USED... *mutter,mutter*

The investigations continue...

[ozboomer]

better to have forgotten the normal permissions than to have no idea what the phrase means. yup, your code changes the icon from a text page to a text page with a terminal on it. thanks.

Without going through all the kerfuffle of the implications (which are MANY, in any Linux/Unix system), I normally just MAKE the thing work by typing:

Code: Select all

# chmod 777 scriptfile

...or you can use Rox and right-click on the filename and there's a 'permissions' option there somewhere (I don't have a Puppy with me at the mo to check)... which will have 'execute+searchable' as a default permissions to set (I think). More info: http://linux.die.net/Linux-CLI/file-permissions.html

i remember early on (i'm new to linux--xp crashed, got jolicloud as a why not...

I'm not new to unix/linux... but I'm still pretty neophyte, although, as of yesterday, I'm 9 years into Puppy manipulating 'coz he's still the fastest, easiest to manipulate.. and I can kinda understand him I come from ~30+ years of VAX/VMS... IBM PCs+CP/M+MS-DOS since Day 1... and the various incarnations of M$-Windoze... and probably am kinda biased that Linux is still a 'programmer's O/S' in that you have to 'edit a file' to make system changes and you often need to have a lot of 'technical knowledge' to get the system to do what you need (I *still* can't get my head around realtime kernels, JACK, ALSA, etc otherwise I'd be using Linux for my music stuff... but oh well).

ubuntu... puppy... Mint...

heh... Back in the mid-2000s I ended-up trying about 100+ Linux distributions... and I ended up exploring Puppy mainly... but I DO have some knoppix, zenwalk, musix and PC LinuxOS distributions floating about.

it's the exclamation point after the pound sign that makes it a script to the machine? are these bash scripts or shell scripts or what?

[...]

ps sorry for all the questions/hijacking your thread, but i'm on the cusp of "programming."

Something in the dim, dark, past of Unix' development (whether it was 'BSD'=west coast USA or 'System V'=east coast USA), some bright spark came up with the concept of the shell - a program that gives you a command line prompt. There is (or used to be) something with the '1st process' that starts ('init') and it creates ('forks off') all these other processes, one of which might be your session on the main screen... but this would be better explained by someone who's more familiar with Linux internals (and Puppy internals, in particular).

Anyhoo, the first line of an executable (text) file needs the "shebang" (the hash-exclamation point) to tell the shell that it's running in, what program to use to process the text of the file... So, that's why you'll see #!/bin/sh all over the place. 'sh' was the first 'shell' program. People added features (and sometimes maintained backward compatability... and sometimes not) and 'they' came up with different shell programs, like -- ksh, csh, tcsh (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcsh), amongst others.

...but better you have a look for a copy of 'RUTE' (a classic on-line book/e-book on Linux) and browse through tldp.org for more good info on Linux, etc.

pps: after that, can i just tell the machine to raise and lower the menu bar?

There is something in Rox that will allow you move where the 'pinboard' (I think it is) will be located - top, bottom, left, right...

reload the wall paper?

...and that is something buried in one of the scripts that starts "X" (or you can manually do something with it in Rox)... but I've forgotten how to do that...

Hopefully, this gives you (a lot of) pointers for further exploration

[Puppus Dogfellow]

Without going through all the kerfuffle of the implications (which are MANY, in any Linux/Unix system), I normally just MAKE the thing work by typing:

Code:
# chmod 777 scriptfile

yeah, i couldn't get the script to run and haven't rebooted to try in a week, but if i type that into a terminal i opened in a folder opened to the location of the script ("scriptfile" is the script's name?) it should run? anyway, thanks for all that info, ozboomer. it's appreciated (though for now the machine's running so well i actually want to do nothing to it and can live with the 45 seconds of inconvenience). [edit: a month later i reboot with the permissions changed and am glad i no longer have to deal with that step--thanks]

i feel i have to retract some of my earlier criticism of gr&r--i went back to a couple of the installations that i thought were messed up by it, and "#fixmenus #wmreboot" seemed to heal all the ills i thought it caused.

[Pelo]

Merci, Zarfi m'est très utile. Usefull.

[ozboomer]

The latest attempt with this was to simply avail myself of the Menu > Setup > Video Upgrade Wizard which helped me install the 'real' NVIDIA drivers... and going through the Menu > Setup > NVIDIA X Server Settings option got me to the point of having the 2 monitors acting as one desktop, so I could get some more space to display windows, etc.

The downsides though... I can't seem to have separate background images on each monitor (big deal), each monitor has a different resolution (to be expected, really - 2 different brands/models/resolutions of monitors)..

...but the biggest downside is that there doesn't seem to be any way to perform a *complete* rollback from the upgrade. If I download and (Puppy) install the NVIDIA drivers & settings, set things up.. and then try to go back to older drivers, "X" reports "Server terminated with error (1)." and such like...

Oh, I can sort-of 'hack' (machete) my way through the uninstall, rmmod nvidia, reboot, xorgwizard to VESA, reboot, configure nouveau, etc... but the 2nd screen is now full of rubbish instead of being off (with no signal), like it was first set-up after the initial (frugal) installation.

Keeping/re-instating /etc/X11/xorg.conf (and/or xorg.conf.0) doesn't get me back only one running monitor... so I'm still unsure about going PROD with the dual monitor display... hmm...

The adventure continues...

[s243a]

Is there an update of this?

[disciple]

It's best to use arandr, or nvidia-settings if you have an nvidia card.

[BarryK]

This is an oldish thread. I never considered using Zarfy before, but after the topic was brought up by forum member 'blgs', decided to create a PET. Blog post here:

http://bkhome.org/news/201812/zarfy-mul ... nager.html

[Argolance]

I discovered Zarfi running EasyOS: in my opinion (and without going into detail), this quite "old" zarfi is far from being as easy to use and efficient as LXRandR...

Regards.

[disciple]

Have you tried arandr? Last I checked it worked best.

[Argolance]

Bonsoir,

Have you tried arandr? Last I checked it worked best.

Downloaded/installed/approved! Simple, visual: in any case, much more handy than Zarfi.
Thanks.
Regards.