I'm currently having difficulties getting my new GeForce card working on multiple monitors (one DisplayPort and one HDMI), and the open source and proprietary drivers are displaying different issues.
For Nouveau: Overscan issues on the HDMI monitor. Whenever I try the following commands, nothing changes:
xrandr --output HDMI-1 --set underscan on
xrandr --output HDMI-1 --set "underscan hborder" 40 --set "underscan vborder" 25
However, my mouse cursor does become invisible. It's still there, though, because when I mouseover icons, they highlight. I read somewhere that changing VTs resets the cursor, but I can't even do that. I do Ctrl-Alt-F2, and it appears that it thinks I switched over to VT2, but I'm still looking at KDE. Pressing keys does nothing in the current open terminal window. I do Ctrl-F1, and the desktop starts to respond again. In the background, in syslog, I'm seeing lines like:
nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: core notifier timeout
nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: wndw-0: timeout
nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: core notifier timeout
nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: wndw-2: timeout
nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: core notifier timeout
nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: core notifier timeout
nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: core notifier timeout
nouveau 0000:01:00.0: DRM: core notifier timeout
In addition, I'm also noticing that if I do an xrandr --prop --verbose, I'm seeing the underscan properties, and it appears that the commands above did take. It's just not reflected on the screen. Finally, I've tried turning off the framebuffer in grub (added nomodeset to command line), but that seemed to make things worse, in that sddm never loaded up.
I haven't yet tried to create a configuration file to make the settings permanent, like the nvidia-settings utility does, simply because I'm still researching the proper settings, but it is on the todo list.
For the nVidia drivers: I'm installing nvidia-driver-440, as recommended by ubuntu-drivers. For the most part, it works well. I still get the same overscan, but the nvidia-settings utility creates an X config that fixes the issue. The problem I have there, though, is that every so often, the entire desktop shifts a bit to the right, I'd guess about 100 pixels. It's not the scan or sync on the monitors, because it's the entire desktop, not just one monitor. The end result is:
- HDMI/right monitor: about 100 pixel wide black bar on the right side, and about 100 pixels of desktop missing on the left side
- DP/left monitor: about 100 pixels of the right monitor showing up on the right side of the screen, and about 100 pixels missing on the left side.
The only solution that I've found is a reboot. There doesn't appear to be anything that I'm doing to trigger it, and the logs are no help. In general, it doesn't take more than 3-5 minutes to happen.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if you need any more information on my setup.
4/12 Update: I've moved up to three monitors now: DP-1 (R), DP-2 (L, primary), and HDMI-1 (C), with the same behavior, but a new twist. After logging in, the KDE task bar is on DP-1 instead of the primary DP-2. Mouse tracks across all three screens the way it's supposed to, but clicking on anything is like clicking on the same spot, but one screen to the left. This is evident when I right-click on the backbground.
When I switch from the GUI to console 2, and then back to GUI, the KDE menu is now on DP-2, and the mouse click events occur in the correct place.
NB: I will also add that I only seem to be making it to a login prompt about 33% of the time; the other 66%, it just hangs during boot in various places. No consistency to where yet. However, I can't yet be sure this has anything to do with the GTX-1650, so it may be unrelated. It's possible I may have bumped something loose during the video card install.
