Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

So commenting out the icons in the polybar workspace switcher and letting it revert to numbers, makes this dual monitor setup actually very smooth sailing now. With the workspaces numbered it's very obvious which ones assigned to monitor1 and monitor2.

I'm liking this setup more and more.

So here's an interesting behavior, which is apparently by design, and it might have to do with a couple settings in spectrwm.conf, namely workspace_clamp and warp_focus

When the polybar is on monitor1, and there is an open window on monitor2 workspace-n, clicking the polybar workspace switcher workspace-n icon on montior1 will move that workspace to monitor1. I'd have experiment to see what would happen if I allow the polybar to be on both monitors, if it works both ways.

@Sofiya and @rockedge,

One more update on the dual montiors and I'm done. It's working great now that I understand it completely.

I set the /root/polybar/config monitor setting back to:
monitor = ${env:MONITOR}
;monitor-fallback = HDMI

and that puts the polybar on both monitors, now when on monitor2 and I click on a polybar monitor2 workspace switching icon that contains windows on a monitor1 workspace, the windows don't move to monitor2. And I think that's the best operation. If I want to chage a window to a workspace on the other monitor, it's easy enough to either drag it, or send it there with MOD+Shift+[0-9].

So basically, leaving polybar config in it's default state, as well as spectrwm.conf, and setting ArandR to show monitors correctly is all that is needed to operate dual monitors in spectrwm with polybar. All that is required is understanding the polybar workspace switcher and how spectrwm manages workspaces on dual monitors.

but note it's best to have spectrwm set to display workspace numbers as opposed to icons to easily interpret which monitor regions workspaces are currently clamped. Monitor two workspaces will be placed in polybar to the right of the last monitor1 assigned or unassigned workspace.

And that's all it takes really.

edit: Well now, I spoke too soon. It's true that clicking an icon on polybar doesn't move workspaces from the inactive monitor to the monitor being clicked, but SCROLLING the icons with a mouse does! Kind of a quirk I suppose, but also an added bit of functionality.

@rockedge and @Sofiya,

It's easy to configure multiple monitor settings in ArandR to auto load at boot.

Simply run ArandR, configure the montiors and positions, then save the layout. It saves the layout in /root/.screenlayout. Then symlink the saved layout to /root/Startup and it will load at boot. If the polybar doesn't appear on monitor2, a simple restarting of spectrwm will correct that. Maybe a timing element involved that could be solved with a sleep command in the layout.sh script.

Some reports using 08KLV-spectr-audio.sfs on a Dell Precision 4600.

Running Ardour8 small recording project, Carla rack loaded with a liquidsfz plugin instrument sample, at jack buffer 128 with CPU shedutil governor resulted in Ardour playback with pops and clicks in audio. These did not get recorded however, and once the governor was switched to performance, then the playback was smooth.

continued:
Encountering distorted audio in spots now when running Ardour or musikcube for a few minutes or more. The distortion will go away after a period of time usually. This issomething I did not enounter using KLV-airedale-RT which I'm using the same pipewire configurations, really just a small adjustment in the jack.conf buffer rate. Will do some further testing.

followup:
Well it looks like logging out and logging back in cleared up the distorted audio. So for now I've got to chalk that up to something involving musikcube's pipewire driver.

further investigation
booting up LibreWolf causes this distortion of Ardour playback, along with LibreWolf playback. I've got to wonder if there is some resampling problem going on in pipewire-pulse.

preliminary conclusion
Shutting down Ardour cleared up the disorted audio in LibreWolf. So again this points to mixing pipewire-pulse audio with pipewire-jack audio. Now I'm running pipewire-jack at 128K buffer, and haven't tried matching any of the pipewire-pulse configs to the same buffer, but don't know if that would cause distortion or not. It could simply be my buffer is too low, But cpu indicators are not indicating that they are running to the max. So I need to look into it more.

further observation
after closing down Ardour and playing LibreWolf audio for sometime, I encountered some more distortion, seemed to be in one video with high spike levels, so I decided to change my audio interface configuration in pavucontrol from Pro Audio to Analog Stereo Duplex and this seems to clear it up after replaying the section of video that seems to induce the distortion.

For a further experiment I opened Ardour again and played both LibreWolf and Ardour audio simultaneously and switched the pavucontrol interface setting from Pro Audio to Analog Stereo Duplex and back again. Also lowered the output level of LibreWolf, and this seems to have cleared it up. In fact the volume issue may have something to do with it, that is mixing audio signals when the db levels are on the top side.

Hmm interesting bit of results. Now running with audio perfectly clean, and it may have been levels the whole time. I haven't been able to duplicate the distortion in 30 minutes of running multiple audio sources. Wow.

Update on the above mentioned audio distortion issue. I haven't had that occur since. I'm chalking that up to a bad musikcube-pipewire driver which I ran before all that began occurring.

I now have Spectr Studio running with dual monitors very smoothly, and to do so, with my chosen desktop backgrounds appearing on each montior, I had to adjust spectrwm.conf by commenting out autorun: nitrogen and instead put a nitrogen startup script with a sleep 2 command in /root/Startup.

What that does is allow the Arandr screenlayout.sh symlinked to /root/Startup to complete the screen setup before the backgrounds are loaded by nitrogen.

@rockedge

I'm running a really badass Spectr-rc1 right now, and yesterday I did a system update on one of my installs and ran it for a good 4 hours, then I got up and left the computer idle for about 45 minutes, came back and it had logged out. I logged back in and it seemed to work alright. (It's possible I logged out instead of shut down, or something dumb)

I'll keep my eye on it, might have been a fluke, or just needed a restart after the update, but it had me wondering with all the update issues in Airedale, if you eventually had to change a few things, and if so are those changes applied to Spectr, and if I need to rebuild at some point. Or if so, maybe a quick fix I can apply to this rc-1, since most changes you make I apply as we go anyway, and usually my one version behind is more or less the same as the current.

@geo_c on a DELL Optiplex 980 I have seen this happen before. But in this case this machine has a reputation for acting oddly and I suspect it happens only if the Suspend is active. With this machine it might logout or it might go into this loop of not waking up and can't be turned off until I pull the plug. To sum it up, not sure what it is yet because this is happening with KLV-Airedale.

I hope it's only an accidental logout........

I did not change anything after it was clear the problem was the upstream Void Linux updates, and it straightened itself out.

rockedge wrote: Tue Mar 05, 2024 5:20 pm

@geo_c on a DELL Optiplex 980 I have seen this happen before. But in this case this machine has a reputation for acting oddly and I suspect it happens only if the Suspend is active. With this machine it might logout or it might go into this loop of not waking up and can't be turned off until I pull the plug. To sum it up, not sure what it is yet because this is happening with KLV-Airedale.

I hope it's only an accidental logout........

I did not change anything after it was clear the problem was the upstream Void Linux updates, and it straightened itself out.

Interesting!

This brings up a few issues I've been wondering about.

1st of all, it seems like in all of the KLVs there is no way to keep the machine from suspending at some point. Even just the screen shutting off, I'm not sure that's actually suspending. I thought it was Xfce for awhile, but it seems to apply across the board with Void based systems.

I'm running three Dell laptops, and the oldest one shuts the screen off, but you can still move the mouse, but can't get it back without a hard boot, or if I have the power settings set to do a proper shutdown with the power button, that work's and actually does a shutdown. I can make those settings in Airedale using the Xfce power manager, but haven't figured out how to do it in Spectr. BUT, I found a workaround for that. closing the lid keeps it from locking up like that, and allows me to leave the machine for long periods of time. When I open the lid the screen comes back. Works for both Spectr and Airedale.

So being that Airedale has the Xfce power manager, what is the mechanism to make these settings in Spectr?

Just a thought: If you run a PC that has a folder it shares to the LAN community, you dont want the PC to sleep in such a way as activity with the LAN adapter is stopped.

This should NOT be considered as some abnormal behavior or use.

So power-saving approaches must take that into account. KLs are a powerful OS with several very-very good implementations as it continues to improve in home-use services.

@Clarity
I only experiment with suspend and don't normally enable it on any machines that share directories on the LAN and often some older machines will not consistently come fully back to a normal run state. Screen blanking and monitor sleep are functions I will enable.

@geo_c
Power Manager in XFCE4 desktops really makes control of screen blanking and monitor sleep switching to very low energy consumption easy from a GUI, which currently in KLV-Spectr can not be done in the same way or close to it.

So we'll begin to research it and with some experimentation see what can be done to supply KLV-Spectr-rc* and KLV-Spectr-RT with a central control panel to supply the same capabilities. A GUI resembling the xfce4 Power Manager would be optimal.

I don’t know how you assembled the assembly, in my assembly there is a screen lock + sleep+Don't lock the screen while audio is playing after a specified time in the config "/root/Startup/xlock_xidlehook"

xlock-xidlehok.xbps
https://gitlab.com/sofija.p2018/kla-ot2 ... line=false

Sofiya wrote: Wed Mar 06, 2024 10:17 pm

I don’t know how you assembled the assembly, in my assembly there is a screen lock + sleep after a specified time in the config "/root/Startup/xlock_xidlehook"

xlock-xidlehok.xbps

That's helpful. I used the rc-1 iso and did a PFI build, and my /root/Startup doesn't contain xlock_xidlehook. Perhaps that was added in rc-2.

I am looking at some other options as well to compare what combination suits KLV-Spectr.

looking at using the zzz already built in using scripts. But I would like more controls to set the time until the screen blank/sleep activates for example and not just a lock screen.