Today I decided to dip my toe in the water with convergence. Using a Belkin USB-C to HDMI adapter, there’s good news and bad news.
The good news is that the connected HDMI monitor was recognized, with the correct native resolution, as an external display, without any need for weird incantations etc. So the DisplayPort over USB-C seemed to go OK; and a valid background image appeared on the monitor.
The bad news is that this doesn’t seem to be ready for prime time. In no combination of display settings could I get anything useful to occur or anything to work properly. “Useful” could mean: an app being mirrored on the external monitor and being able to be driven from the phone. Sometimes (very occasionally) I could get the app to come up on the external monitor but things still didn’t work properly.
Maybe. I don’t have that installed yet and it isn’t installed out of the box. Will make a note to do that. It is covered by the Wiki.
There’s a bigger question though as to how this is /supposed to/ work and what the appropriate external display Settings are.
/Most/ of the time the external monitor was just showing the background image - so not a very exciting or informative screen shot and is the Screen Shot tool even going to work with an external monitor? One for tomorrow I think.
OK, but how is this /supposed to/ work? Maybe my expectations are completely incorrect.
Let’s say that the phone is in portrait mode i.e. 720x1440. I connect an external monitor 1920x1080 (landscape mode). I attempt to choose to mirror the displays.
Does that even work? Do I have to set the phone to landscape mode first? Some apps are not very happy in landscape mode. Can I set the external monitor to portrait mode? (neither ‘left’ nor ‘right’ appeared to do anything)
What is the expected output on the external monitor? The best effort scaled mirror image? The same app but operating differently on each display i.e. adapting independently?
If not trying to do mirroring, how do I control which display an app displays on? can I move an app from one display to the other?
I think that, for now, the convergence only adds a second monitor to L5, so no mirroring. You can drag apps from L5 to the second monitor. See the video after he connects the hub:
Here is moving it with a keyboard shortcut (needs attached keyboard(?)):
In case of no external keyboard and mouse, I think there must be some kind of command line comand, that instructs gnome(?) to move a window on the second display…
Yes, that’s why I mentioned that this is not a dock, just an external monitor.
If it were docked with keyboard, video and mouse then the external display etc. can basically replace the built-in display, which can be disregarded. /Everything/ can happen on the external display, just as would happen on a regular computer.
Docks are a bit expensive. I don’t own one. So I can’t do a full test of this right now.
The kind of scenario that I was imagining is doing a presentation. I’m looking at the phone, I’m driving it on the phone, but other people can see what is on an external monitor, and the external monitor is a mirror of the phone screen.
Personally, I’m for avoiding the use of the dock word. I consider that thing as an I/O ports extension. Depending on the extension, it can provide only one port (one HDMI or one audio jack or one ethernet port), or many more and different. So, dock, undock doesn’t feel that right to me as I don’t know exactly what it supposed to mean.
Is this meant to be “Blue (flashing)”? Or is there a difference between “Blue” and “Blue (flashing)”?
Also, what makes the Blue turn off?
I received an email, I read the email, I deleted the email, I restarted Geary. Nothing seems to make the Blue turn off. I expected that at least one of those (excluding receiving the email) would cause the Blue LED to go away.
While it’s charging, alternating red and pink is all very pretty and all, but …
Some hours later I had done something and the Blue LED went away.
Answer: Yes and it does give a bit more insight into what’s going on. Based on my testing, the only Display Mode that works is “Joined” - and most of the time the right hand monitor is ignored for display purposes (but it is captured by Screen Shot).
I’m calling the default background image “blue hexagons”.
In the Screen Shot, the empty space caused by the fact that the external monitor is deeper than the scaled built-in display is “transparent”.
I’ll post a couple of further images from the Display Settings - but with the blue hexagons cropped out for brevity.
I have experienced one system lock-up and one spontaneous reboot while playing around with external monitors, reaffirming my suspicion that this isn’t ready for prime time.
Yes. And “Video Out”, “Out Video”, “Ext. Display” or similar would be much clear for me of what that option is for. I don’t have to translate it in my head everytime.
