Trying to get dual screens to work

[WhiteNoise]

Ok, first off, I am somewhat new at this so please don't assume anything is obvious.

I am trying to get my desktop to stretch across two screens. (for reference, I am using Kubuntu 10.10)

When I start up the system, it duplicates whatever is on the primary monitor onto the the secondary.

Initially, playing with the options in the GUI I thought I had it figured. Under System Settings < Display and Monitor < Size and Orientation there is an option that lets me set the position of my secondary monitor to the "right of" the primary. However, on restarting the computer, this resets to its initial setting of "clone of" the primary.

So I did a bit of reading and found something I could put in the command line:

xrandr --output DVI-I-2 --right-of DVI-I-1

Which again fixes the problem, but only for that given session. On restart we are back to the same scenario.

A bit more reading tells me that putting things in etc/rc.local executes them on start up so I shouldn't have to each time I turn on my computer. Except that putting it in there didn't do anything.

While I am reasonably pleased with myself having learned as much as I did in this little exploration (previously, the only command line thing I knew how to use was apt-get), I am feeling pretty frustrated at this point.

Is there somewhere else I should be putting this other than (or in addition to) etc/rc.local? Do I need to put something other than xrandr thing in there to make it execute?

[tyho]

Is your /etc/rc.local executable?
You can check this using the following command:

ls -l /etc/rc.local

It should show something like:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 306 2010-04-29 14:25 /etc/rc.local

Make sure there are 3 x (for executable). If not, use

sudo chmod +x /etc/rc.local

to make it executable.

[electroman6913]

do you have the setting set to twin view. or separate x screen. make sure you have it set to twin view.