A long time ago I set my system to use a single wallpaper spanning across my multiple monitor setup.
Recently, after a restart this stopped working. I tried following the “xinerama” option to add manually in the “Settings Editor”, I logged in/out, and it didn’t seem to work. Some of the terminology in there is a bit different than the generic XFCE and Ubuntu posts that I’m finding these directions from. Seems like most of the posts about this issue are really old, and possibly out of date.
What am I doing wrong?
Here’s screenshots from my xfce4-desktop Settings Editor screen where I’ve already tried adding xinerama to screen0:
Rather than the Settings Editor, take a look at the Settings Manager > Desktop > Background or xfdesktop-settings or right-click the desktop and select Desktop Settings. I use different colors on each monitor, so I haven’t tested this. If none of the options work, I’ve seen where users will split the image, and assign half to each monitor.
There is suppose to be a “Spanning screens” in the Style drop-down when on the first monitor. It’s not in the documentation. I found it in this bug report and this bug report.
Thanks for the tip, I didn’t see the “Spanning screens” “Style” option because I was on the wrong monitor (I have three at the moment), however to that didn’t work. That said, I did fix it after fiddling with it, and I’m not sure which thing did it for sure, but here’s steps I tried.
Set my primary monitor to “Spanning Screens” - didn’t work, all monitors display copies of the same wallpaper.
Moved my “Desktop” settings to the different monitors and changed the other monitors to “Style” “None”. - didn’t work.
Finally, changed my primary monitor in “Displays” to be a different monitor, then set that monitor to “Spanning screens”. - it popped back into “Spanning” mode correctly.
It seems maybe it matters which monitor you set as your primary monitor matters? I know I recently changed that, but previously my wallpaper spanning wasn’t changed even after several reboots, and this didn’t happen after running updates, so I’m not sure what happened, but for the record, if you’re reading this and have the same problem, try changing what your primary display is set as in the “Display” settings, then change wallpaper and set to "Spanning screens.
