Last week I took delivery of a new 16:9 Benq screen and an ATI HD4770 graphics card. I should have known I was premature. ATI don't support my kernel version

$ uname -vr
2.6.29.6-217.2.3.fc11.i686.PAE #1 SMP Wed Jul 29 16:05:22 EDT 2009

They are working on it.. but not yet. So I sat there with a blank screen, a pretty dumb driver and thought about it. Then I became impatient, did a little research, went shopping and brought home an Nvidia 9500GT. Fitted it yesterday. Rebuilt the kernel kmod ... or the Nvidia driver did when I installed it, launched and there I have two screens working. Nearly.

I took a hint that the Gnome desktop manager may not be the best, but ploughed on, since that's the default FC11 GUI. It so nearly worked. I learned that TwinView was the setup I wanted. The 22" and the 19" acting as one desktop area, so I can drag apps around the screens as I wanted to arrange them. Emacs + cli, browser/Acrobat in pairs to see all of the apps together without Alt tabbing. I couldn't have that on Gnome (or I didn't figure out how to set it up is possibly more accurate). I looked up the xorg.conf ref pages and was ready to do that ... except I found out about kde. To swap was somewhat odd and puzzled me more than a little. Something like

#yum grouplist | grep KDE
then
#yum groupinstall 'KDE (K Desktop Environment)' or whatever the above returns

That installs KDE (it seems not to be there by default, it was a 250Mb install)

then
#switchdesk kde

(Assumes you have switchdesk installed)

Reboot.

At the screen where you're prompted for password....
LOOK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN
(Something I failed to do properly)

Select kde from the options.

Thereafter you can pick up gnome or kde as required.

The puzzle is the kde switch. I've run that login screen hundreds, if not thousands of times. I swear I have never seen the 'taskbar' at the bottom of the screen? Either it wasn't there.... or who the heck looks for screen decorations when entering a password!!! No wonder there are plenty of pages asking how to get into KDE on Google.

I wonder that the kde devs don't pick up on that and make it easier.

Didn't take me long to get used to kde. It even has a screen grabber that is an improvement on the ImageMagick screen capture I was using. KSnapshot is the name and it looks quite usable.

My screen layout is now stable, I have the full 1920x1080 resolution on the 22" screen and 1280x1024 on the smaller screen. I have crisp text on both and a lovely screensaver from the mountains behind Grenoble. I'm a happy bunny tonight.

I even remembered to backup xorg.conf!