Popup windows appear on wrong monitor

[Rocko]

I have a multimonitor setup with an external monitor above the laptop monitor, both physically and configured via the System Settings / Displays. The laptop (lower) monitor is configured to be the primary monitor according to ~/.config/monitors.xml, but note that unity ignores this and always treats the external (top) monitor as the primary one.

Popup windows always appear on the lower monitor, so when an application window is on the top monitor, they are not at all obvious to the user (instead, for modal popup windows, the application appears to have crashed because it is unresponsive).

Obviously, popup windows should appear on the same monitor as the application that launches them.

Applications displaying this behaviour include firefox (eg the enter master password window), nautilus (eg the empty trash confirmation window), and update-manager (eg the run partial upgrade now window).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: unity 5.4.0-0ubuntu2
Uname: Linux 3.3.0-rc6-git-20120304.1234 x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.94.1-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CompizPlugins: [core,composite,opengl,decor,mousepoll,gnomecompat,imgpng,snap,grid,wall,move,place,vpswitch,session,compiztoolbox,extrawm,resize,regex,animation,workarounds,unitymtgrabhandles,expo,fade,scale,ezoom,unityshell]
Date: Sun Mar 11 06:53:36 2012
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release amd64 (20111012)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_AU:en
 TERM=xterm
 LANG=en_AU.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: unity
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-03-10 (0 days ago)

[Sean DS (se4n-1)]

I reproduce this with todays i386 daily build of Precise. Just try using the trash can and it provides confirmation on the wrong screen.

Steps to reproduce:

Install Precise daily,
Delete something,
--> Confirmation appears on wrong screen (else try deleting something from the other screen)

[Rocko (rockorequin)]

Another quick way to demonstrate it is to select the Shutdown option from the panel - the confirmation dialog appears on the wrong screen.

[Rocko (rockorequin)]

unity 5.8.0-0ubuntu1 now displays the dialogs on the same screen as the parent window, but it is a bit inconsistent: on the top monitor, the popups appear centered in their parent window, but in the lower monitor they are only centered horizontally - the popups always appear at the top of the lower monitor.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 930660, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

[Rocko (rockorequin)]

Are you sure it's a duplicate of #874146? That bug is about opening brand new windows; this one is about opening a child window for an already-open application, eg update-manager. In my case, the popup window is always centered correctly horizontally, so whoever displays the window is reading the correct X and width setting for the parent window, just not necessarily the correct Y setting.