Unity does not load after enabling xinerama 13.04

[Jacob Fogg]

It seems like every Ubuntu release breaks my quad monitor setup....

I have two GeForce GT 520's and am running 4 monitors, 3 HP S2031's and one Westinghouse L1975NW turned 90deg. This was working fine with the current LTS. I decided it was time to upgrade my desktop, as I've been running 13.04 on my laptop for a month now (started in beta) with no issues. Here are the steps that have brought me to this point:

1. After installing a fresh cut of 13.04, I was left with 2 HP's on a single 520 card mirroring eachother (Not uncommon to start out this way, all the way back since 10.04). I opened display settings and saw it detected all 4 monitors right off the bat. I got excited... first time this has happened. I unchecked "Mirrored" and it enabled all 4 monitors. After a restart, it kinda worked, but the contents monitor 3 & 4 kept swapping back and forth, so if I drug a window over to monitor 3 it would jump between 3 & 4 rapidly... this continued even if I drug it over to monitor 4.

2. I disabled this and went to software & updates and additional drivers and chose the latest nvidia driver & restarted. Still no luck, and still no Nivida-settings. Oh, and after trying to tweak the settings a bit more, I ended up in a login loop. I would login, the screens would go black and kick me right back to the login page. I could get into the guest account no problem. I ended up having to delete a config file (after backing it up... not remembering which atm) in order for unity to regenerate the default of that file and allow me back into unity without the login loop.

3. I downloaded the latest nvidia drivers from nvidia's site (nvidia-313-updates) and followed their instructions for installing. Rebooted, and behold, I have two monitors working in twinview. I backed up my xorg.conf and opened nvidia-settings. I configured all 4 monitors, applied settings, saved settings and restarted. I was excited to see all four monitors working for the login screen! ... then I logged in and Unity no longer opens. I ctrl+alt+f1'd and restored my xorg.conf and restarted. I have since tried several times to make this work, and every time, unity will not launch.

I, like may others I am sure, am a web developer and multi-monitor is a key to huge productivity gains for me. I don't want to have to go back to LTS, I am loving some of the newer 13.04 features, but I need this to work!!!

If anyone has any other suggestions, or even a video card recommendation (sub $200) that will support 4 monitors and not die and leave me stranded with every OS update, I am all ears!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Daniel Lovejoy (daniel-lovejoy)]

I am having the same display rapid flash of windows between display 3 and 4 issue with quad displays (ati HD 3400) with the default gallium drivers and when I load the ati legacy drivers from ppa I can only get 2 displays that have unity the other two display a blank x server

[Gene (gliverman)]

Just did a 13.04 install, switched to the nvidia binary driver that was listed as "tested" under additional drivers, enabled Xinerama, rebooted, logged in, no desktop. After it sat for a minute or two I allowed it to send it's crash report. In it, it said Compiz had crashed. Hope this helps.

[Daniel (dnogueira86)]

I have the same problem : Unity does not load after enabling xinerama 13.04

[Jelle De Loecker (skerit)]

After adding the option "Composite" "Enabled" to the xorg.conf file, I got compiz to load.

Unfortunately, it looks terrible. The entire positioning is out of whack when xinerama is enabled.

[Christopher Townsend (townsend)]

Since this is reported only on 13.04 and that release is no longer supported, I'm closing this as Won't Fix.