Selection of primary display in dual-head setup is broken

[Michael Wild]

I'm reposting question http://pad.lv/q/149909 as a bug, since nobody answered and I think it seriously breaks usability.

What is the mechanism by which unity determines what the primary screen is if I enable an external monitor? When using the nvidia-settings utility to enable the external monitor in TwinView mode to be "left-of" the built-in monitor, I always have to do so twice in order for the launcher and menu-bar to appear on the external monitor; i.e. the procedure is

1) enable external monitor
2) disable
3) enable external monitor

 It is consistent in that I have to always do it twice, but also a bit disturbing. Also, the "Make this the primary display for the X screen" checkbox doesn't seem to have any effect. It does when using Gnome.

Is this intended behaviour (if so, is there a way to tell unity to pick the external monitor first) or a bug?

Using:
- nVidia NVS 3100M
- nvidia-current_270.30-0ubuntu3
- Lenovo ThinkPad T410

[Sebastian Rühl (sebastian-ruehl)]

May be a duplicate of http://pad.lv/742544

[Michael Wild (themiwi)]

Is it just me, or is the search functionality in LP really that bad? I never seem to find relevant bugs when searching for my problem before filing it... Anyways, this report also contains the information that you can "toggle" the primary display by a sequence of enabling/disabling the dual-head setup. Haven't had the time to try the ~/.config/monitors.xml hack so far, though.

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

Yes, seems like duplicate of bug 742544 marking as such.

On the other question of launchpad's search I find it quite helpful ;)