Q4OS Forum

Durhammer

Member

Registered: 2025-01-28

Posts: 230

Windowing/monitor issues in new Andromeda install [SOLVED via SDDM]

Hey folks, just installed Andromeda. Went well, but....

I have a portrait mode Dell monitor situated above my Samsung laptop monitor, so I run my special xrandr command to set it up. It was working fine until I did something (like change the screen resolution so that things were a bit larger (1.2 X), and it said I needed to log out and back in. Did that, and now my top monitor is just black. If I open a terminal command window, it will apparently start in the upper/dark monitor. If I right mouse click in the lower monitor and open a terminal here, it's fine. If then try MOVING the terminal window up to the upper window (just to see what happens), the top part of the window disappears at the boundary between monitors -- BUT THE CURSOR MOVEMENT ICON SHOWS UP in the upper monitor, as it should, and where it should be.  Basically, it's like moving the window behind a black curtain but the cursor icon shows up on it like a light shining through it.

What's going on and how do I fix it?

EDIT: I am now running in a different distro. Looks like my Andromeda TDE setup is totally hosed. After entering the above notes via Konqueror, I decided to see if the TDE Control Center's display app would help. NOOOOO!!! Not only did it NOT help, when I tried "testing" the monitors setup, EVERYTHING went black, and it looks like the lower monitor has been rotated -- at least the cursor pointer is pointing to the left and moving it via the trackball makes it go in funny places.

Not only that, but when I tried using the power button to shut the system down, it seemed that it must have gone into hibernation mode or something like that. Trying to restart via the power button initially just came back to the blackness. I held the power button down long enough for it to start showing the Samsung boot process, but then it showed me a Grub Rescue menu, like grub had been clobbered.

Thank goodness I keep an MX Linux Live USB stick around. Booted that up and used the MX Tools boot repair on both the internal drive and the external drive (which is what *should* have come up from a cold boot, but showed the mess above instead). I'm now running in the external drive's MX Linux session.

How do I (CAN I) repair the Q4OS 6.2 (?) Andromeda install so it's usable? Really didn't expect this!!!!

Last edited by Durhammer (2026-01-15 04:43)

Durhammer

Member

Registered: 2025-01-28

Posts: 230

Re: Windowing/monitor issues in new Andromeda install [SOLVED via SDDM]

Okay, SORTA ignore this, but don't really. I was able to log back in after doing the grub repair stuff mentioned above.

I have NO idea what transpired, but I will be steering clear of any TDE display utilities from now on. I vaguely remember similar issues in Q4OS 5.8 TDE.

I'm probably going to try to reproduce the nice WM type setup I crafted in 5.8 with JWM or Openbox and tint2, jgmenu and such. Very light, yet still full featured,

Durhammer

Member

Registered: 2025-01-28

Posts: 230

Re: Windowing/monitor issues in new Andromeda install [SOLVED via SDDM]

Here's an update on this issue, and it's not just for Q4OS Andromeda. It's an issue with Trinity Display Manager.

After the noted problems (there were others), I trashed my Q4OS Andromeda installation.

I installed a different installation in its place -- Exe GNU/Linux, which *also* is built around the Trinity Desktop Environment. I didn't fiddle around too much in TDE before I began working up an Openbox session setup. When I did my usual monitor setup with a 24" Dell monitor in "portait mode" (rotated left) above my laptop monitor, I started seeing the same issues I reported in the original post. The top monitor had no color, no part of the wallpaper, and some apps that were started would seem to "disappear" though they could be seen on the tint2 taskbar. A window moved up into the blackness would disappear -- except for the cursor icon.

Did some sleuthing and ran across a blog by a guy who mildly trashed TDE but said the problem was with the DM. I downloaded and installed SDDM in place of TDM, and the problems went away! Login screen seems to look a bit more polished as well. So there.

q4osteam

Q4OS Team

Registered: 2015-12-06

Posts: 6,114

Website

Re: Windowing/monitor issues in new Andromeda install [SOLVED via SDDM]

Thanks for sharing the solution. We will investigate the issue as well.