As of last week's update at the Mono Summit in Madrid, my login screen suddenly started appearing only in the upper-left quadrant of my laptop screen.

It appears that gdm thinks my resolution is 1024x768 while my actual screen resolution is 1440x900

Even more frustrating is that I always get an xconsole window with "mtr" errors and sometimes network device errors as well, which, if I click, I cannot put cursor focus back into the gdm text-entry widget to allow me to actually log in, so I have to go to the console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) to kill X/gdm to allow me another go at logging in.


maybe this consists of 3 bugs:

1. xconsole = bad, don't use it. it's scary. it can steal cursor focus. it's completely unhelpful unless you are maybe a kernel hacker (which I and our customers are likely not). These errors would best be redirected at an actual log file or something... certainly not to xconsole. I can't copy/paste from xconsole to submit bug reports or support requests, so it seems a log file is win-win (if they aren't critical, I'm not scared off by them. if they are critical, I have a log file I can submit to bugzilla/tech-support), where-as xconsole is lose-lose.

2. my login screen resolution is horked? I haven't the foggiest idea what is wrong or how to fix it. I tried digging thru gdm config files to no avail as well as running SAX and resetting my resolution to 1440x900. I also tried disabling Dual Head Mode.

3. After login, I can seemingly use my entire 1440x900 screen, but my gnome-panel defaults to simply filling the bottom of the 1024x768 sub-screen (which occupies the upper-left quadrant of my 1440x900 screen) until I manually moved it to the bottom of the 1440x900 screen. I do, however, have a problem with maximizing windows... if the window is inside of the 1024x768 subscreen area, it maximizes to the 1024x768 sub-screen rather than the 1440x900 fullscreen, but if I hit maximize while the window is in the area outside of the 1024x768 sub-screen, it maximizes properly. It's also very clear that the Logout/Shutdown/Volume/etc windows think that my resolution is 1024x768 because they do not appear horizontally centered on my screen, rather they appear horizontally centered relative to the 1024x768 sub-screen.


Also of note is that several people at the Madrid conference last week (other than Aaron Bockover and myself) had the same exact problem.